Dante Di Stefano

August 05, 2017

DD: How did Winter Goose come into being? Can you give us a brief history of the press?

JK: In 2011 I started WGP from a desire to stay close to the written word as a writer and lover of art. The success of our press came quickly with an overwhelming amount of submissions and support from the writing community. We’ve now published over a hundred books and carry several award-winning authors and titles in our catalog.

DD: Tell us a little bit about your poetry catalog. What do Winter Goose books share in common?

JK: Our poetry catalog ranges in variety from traditional form poetry to a more extensive catalog of contemporary poetry and poets. Our poetry books are all laced with a genuine heart-felt journey through the eyes of many different perspectives. In that genuineness, we find a common thread for all our poetry catalog.

DD: What are you looking for in prospective authors?

JK: We are looking for unique and well-designed writing with a strong voice. We publish based on quality more than what the industry may consider marketable material. We appreciate the process of writing, whether fiction or poetry, and are always excited to find the next fresh and talented new voice.

DD: You’ve published two of Bill Stratton’s poetry collections. Can you tell us about what you most admire in his poetry?

JK: Bill brings a strong sense of self with his writing. He writes from a place that brings you in and keeps you there. It’s genuine, raw, and heartfelt. The power shines brightly through his words and gives him a solid foundation that we honor and appreciate.

DD: You grew up in a rural area of upstate New York. Can you talk about how this upbringing influences your writing and how the natural world figures in your work?

WS: I don't know if I can say anything I haven't already tried to say in my poems, though what I've tried to say has filled a decent part of two books now, so perhaps I ought to try. Where I am from is central New York, more hills than mountains, more dead farms and dollar stores than mines or mills. It's beautiful and haunting, and within my life I saw the end of a certain way of life and the movement into another; from working on farms and local factories to an economy that never really sees the upswing when the country does well and feels every bit of pain when it does not. Drug addiction and violence have increased, as they have in a lot of places where poverty is a problem. Still, there are amazing people there whose friendship I value greatly and who often appear in my poems. I obviously have a lot of conflicting feelings about where I am from, but I'm also fiercely loyal—my friends from home know that, and to me, that is very important. Of course it's a rural place, and in particular I grew up on an old farm with several hundred acres to roam, and several thousand acres of state land on two sides. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods when I was a kid. My father subscribed in part to the idea that I should leave the house whenever I wanted or could (and sometimes when I did not) without a curfew or expectation on return. "He'll come back when he's hungry," I remember him telling my stepmother. As a result, there is little I do not know about those woods and fields. It is a tiny corner of the earth, and I am very aware of how sheltered I was in some ways, despite my fierce independence and oppositional defiance. Those years are formative, and for me, they helped to form a sense of self which maybe relies too much on itself to construct meaning; that is, I often had a hard time relying on others when I reached adolescence, because in my isolation I taught myself that I was all that I needed. Turns out, or so I think now, that's not always the best way to go about life. It taught me patience and that examining simple things at length and in detail can yield surprising results. It taught me that I am something small and fragile and mortal but also big and powerful and destructive. It taught me about consequence. I digress. The natural world is, in short, important to me not only as a writer, but as a person. I hope I do it some justice in my work. Since I believe, in some part, that writing is a process of pulling the internal (reflection, insight, observation, interpretation) and externalizing it as language, I recognize and do my best to work with the kind of internal abilities the natural world endowed me with. I have learned to listen for the voice I recognize as my own, and it is often easiest to see in the natural world. I hope that answers the question.

DD: In These Things Too Have Shape you have poems about being stabbed and being punched in the face. Different forms of violence punctuate the otherwise gentle forward movement of this collection. Could you discuss the role of violence in your work?

WS: This is an important topic for me, and one I think writers ought to speak to more often. I would like to think myself a non-violent person. I would like to think that I no longer need violence in my life, either as way for conflict resolution or as a means of self-discovery, both of which have been a part of my past. I do my best to work through anger and violence internally now, recognizing them for what they are: destructive and unnecessary, and usually ineffective. That said, if I ignore the role that violence has played in forming the person that I am, or if I dismiss the part is has played in the world I grew up in, I am lying to my readers and worse, to myself. The world is sometimes a violent place, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. I say this not to advocate for violence, but to advocate confronting it, to advocate for resolving root problems that lead to violence, to advocate for self-reflection. Often people pretend they are not capable of violence—that’s the worst kind of fallacy. I believe we ought to admit to ourselves, each of us, that we are capable of being violent creatures, hurting and even killing, because I believe it is only with this admission that we can even attempt to solve violence as an epidemic worldwide, and within our own homes. In addition to this, I think poetry and writing in general has its roots in violence. Some of our oldest recorded writings for instance, are incredibly violent. We don't teach Beowulf or Gilgamesh to glorify violence. But to pretend that those works are not riddled with violence is silly. For me, a careful examination of what that violence is, how it operates for the characters and for the narratives, why it exists and what it measures...those are important questions, which I think we might overlook at times. So yes, my poems on occasion record violence, but they are non-fictional instances of violence (as far as my memory operates) and they serve an important function not only for the book, but for me. I would very much like to think that what readers I have are able to engage that violence on several levels, and that their reactions are both visceral and honest.

DD: You begin the collection with my favorite poem, “Milkweed,” which seems really to be an Ars Poetica. In this poem, you write that the burst remains of a milkweed pod are your Paris. What is your personal definition of poetry?

WS: Oh dear. I guess I might say: Poetry is that which, if I attempt to define it, I will sound pompous and moronic at the same time. Milkweed is as close as I can get to a definition, and hopefully I sound neither, but odds are good that someone out there think I sound one or the other or both fairly consistently. I think, ultimately, whatever my definition is, it's not completely static, and hopefully you can get a feel for it by reading my poems, which I would vastly prefer to attempting to distill it in a definition here.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

WS: I don't think I read nearly enough contemporary poetry to be any sort of judge. I don't really read enough contemporary poetry, period. I do my best, but there’s so much of it out there, I rarely feel like I'm doing even a passable job. At the risk of sounding completely self-centered, I do read every journal that publishes my work cover-to-cover, and I've found some amazing poems, poets, and friends that way. I suppose I see a trend towards narrative poetry slowly gaining ground on lyric poetry. I recently had a discussion with an editor and poet friend of mine about the types of poetry he sees for submissions. He explained to me about Hoagland's essay and the skittery poet (which I then had to find and read), and I have to say I agree, though again my experience is limited. Personally, my aesthetics run less associative and “experimental” (though that term irks me), but I recognize that those poems have value outside of my taste preferences. I've always thought poetry might want to consider allowing accessibility to be a word which, instead of gathering scorn, might have value. I have had a poet nearly take a swing at me for the very idea that poetry should be able to be 'accessible' if it so chooses. So, I would like to think that poetry today is, increasingly, large enough to accommodate all types of poems and all types of audiences. I certainly think it can be, and while I don't buy a lot of books that don't fit my aesthetic, I am honored to be published in the same journals as those that differ, and I would very much like to live in a world where both can exist peacefully, as it were.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

WS: Ha! Prufrock maybe? I'm terrible at memorizing poems, it’s embarrassing. Prufrock was the first poem though, that made me think: "Shit. I wish I had written that." and really feel it.

DD: We both attended Binghamton University as undergraduates at the same time, in the late 90s and early 00s. I was lucky enough to be in Liz Rosenberg’s poetry workshop and Michael Klein’s creative nonfiction workshop with you. How did Binghamton University influence your development as a writer?

WS: Looking back on my life as a writer, I have been so fortunate. Not only to be in those classes with you (and several other talented, amazing people), but also to have the teachers I have had. From a very young age I was lucky enough to have one or two who would challenge me, push me, allow me to invest myself in learning and education and writing. Liz, Michael, Ruth Stone, David Chirico and others at Binghamton, a couple of very good high school English teachers, even a teacher who had me in a gifted and talented program in elementary school. As I write this, I am recovering from the loss of one of my great mentors in writing, Tom Lux. Along with Stuart Dischell and a few others at the Sarah Lawrence summer program for adult writers, he helped me to discover that writing was, actually, a thing I could not live without. I have met and worked with some amazing writers over the years, many of whom are also amazing people. David Rivard and Mekeel Mcbride helped guide me through my graduate program, and I was lucky enough to Charlie Simic as my thesis advisor. I was able to spend a day with Phil Levine less than a year before he passed, and we spent a few hours talking about poetry and writing and poverty and how we both felt a sense of responsibility to the people and places that raised us. I have so many wonderful moments with so many wonderful writers, and they just keep coming. Lately I have been lucky enough to be accepted into a group of talented writers in Burlington and I am lucky enough to say that Major Jackson now reads my poems every week, for example. Not all of my encounters with poets and writers have been positive ones, and certainly I have met some writers which, for one reason or another don't seem interested in engaging with me. But overall, I have been blindingly fortunate. It is my great desire to be able to give back to poetry and writing and young poets and writers what has been given to me.

I'm not sure I can specifically say exactly what Binghamton did for me as a writer, the time now seems to all blend together. I'm not sure I can quantify my time there in a satisfactory way. I suppose it will have to suffice for me to say: It influenced me greatly, and I would not be the writer I am today without it.

DD: I’d like to end with your poem, “Harness,” which appeared in a recent issue of Field. Could you introduce us to this poem?

WS: “Harness,” like the vast majority of my poems, is in large part non fictional and narrative. My father really did drive a team of draft horses, they really did take off with me on their backs, and I really was found some time later in an old apple orchard/pasture. To me, that's important, though I've heard from others that the distinction holds less meaning for a reader, and I have only their feedback to go on. When I became a father, my perspective and thoughts on my childhood started to shift. In particular, one day, I remembered this story, told to me many times by many family members. I was too young to really recall the incident, though I remembered instantly the smell of the horses and how the world looked from their backs. When I started to process the memory through the experience of a father, I nearly had a panic attack. I have no idea what I would do if my daughter disappeared up and over a hill on the back of a massive spooked horse. Chase them, I suppose. As for the ending, I think what was most telling about my memory was that I did not remember specifically that event, though I remember many others and I remember generally things about the horses. To me, that indicates that the event, while terrible and traumatic for the adults in my family, wasn't for me. I thought about that a long time, and the story of what passed between Angel and I came to me slowly, in the way things sometimes do when they have truth without adhering strictly to fact. I often write instinctively, doing my best to lose myself in the process, listening more than speaking (the exact opposite of how I revise). In Harness, I think I was somewhat successful in tapping into my own voice, and finding a way to translate a real event of my life into the fantastic we sometimes need to connect experience to the universal. I'm not great at talking about my poems, or at least, I aspire to be much better than I am. I hope that suffices.

Harness

They tell me I was too young to remember the day the horse team spooked and broke the reins and left my father empty-handed, running after them with me on their backs. I rode every time he took them out, Marsha one was called and Angel the other and I was too young (maybe four) to be up on their broad backs, without a saddle, but they were so calm not even a shotgun made them bolt and my father was so young and proud not even his son could scare him. I was never scared, their black manes smelled so good and the rise and fall of their shoulders as I lay on my stomach pulled the horizon up and down and I kept the flies from their face with a long branch. Now that I am a father and my father is dead I think he must have felt, in the moment the reins left his hands and the trace snapped, that all of what his life had led to up to at that point was now in full flight from him, his hands never so empty as right then and it was a beautiful day to lose a son. I was lost for only an hour they tell me, but I know the truth: the horses and I ran to the thickest part of the old orchard and there I passed into Angel and Marsha watched as Angel passed into me and that is why still today on spring days in the sun when the people are all very happy to have the warmth I am remembering a collar and the feel of a boy on my back and the taste of wild apples sour and sweet.

Jessica Kristie is an award winning author, social entrepreneur, and a lover of poetry. She is an advocate for art, an activist against human trafficking, and a soulful contributor to the strengthening of our creative communities. Her novel, Barbed-Wire Butterflies, donates 100% of all print royalties and a percentage of digital copies and merchandise to fight human trafficking. Look for her poetry collections, Dreaming in Darkness, Threads of Life, and Winter Dress, as well as her eBook offering to creators, Weekly Inspirations for Writers & Creators. You can find her fusion of poetry and music with the collaboration, Kristie & Cloverfield, released through Ultrasonic Music Germany, and available everywhere. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica Kristie discovered her passion for writing as a child. Along with her creative side, she works in the publishing industry, is an avid supporter of all creative souls, and hopes to draw readers into her world through shared emotion. She inspires to forgive, remember, and heal, while continuing to dedicate herself to fighting social injustices.

William Stratton currently lives in Colchester, Vermont. He teaches writing and poetry at SUNY Plasttsburgh, and is associate poetry editor at theSaranac Review. His first full length collection of poetry, Under The Water Was Stone (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014) has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery award and the Eugene Paul Nassar Award. His second book These Things Too Have Shape was released in January of 2016. His poetry is published or forthcoming in: FIELD, Sugar House Review, Spillway, The Cortland Review, Best of Pif Magazine, The North American Review, Connotation Press, Canary, and others.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

July 18, 2017

Zeina Hashem Beck’s second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, begins with the lines: “I write in English the way I roam foreign cities—full of street light/ & betrayal, until I find a coffee shop that speaks Arabic.” The poems in Louder than Hearts range across Tripoli, Mosul, Syria, Beirut, London, Paris, and New York, illuminating what is simultaneously most foreign and familiar in those places: the fundamental human drive to connect with others through language and the complexities of doing so in a world divided by cultural, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries. Hashem Beck writes from a certainty in the consolations of the written word. For her, a poem is “a tree without roots/ a street with enormous wings”; each line here both defies uprooting and takes flight, suddenly and assuredly. As the title poem notes, the motions and avowals in Hashem Beck’s work are bound but not beholden to tradition: “The woman in me is thousands/ of years old, her voice louder/ than hearts and derbakkehs.” The ancient tattoo of drumbeat and bloodline cross corridors, balconies, playgrounds, land-mine fields, broken houses, wastelands, continents, oceans, and ideologies. Louder than Hearts bears witness to the scarred and to the disconsolate, to the war-ravaged and to the displaced, to the strange interior countries one must survey and commit to memory if one is to understand the reality of human suffering.

Above all else, Zeina Hashem Beck’s work attempts to translate her particular understanding of human suffering into a poetics of radical empathy. Her poem, “Body,” emblematizes the elegiac uplift and heartache at the center of this collection. The poem reads:

Body

For Hassan Rabeh, young dancer displaced from Syria, who killed himself by jumping from a seventh-floor balcony in Beirut,Wednesday, June 22, 2016

& perhaps you flew. I read the news, how you plunged from the seventh floor, a Beirut balcony, & I am filled with a sound of sirens, a need to be alone. This war this theater this city this. & I was at a Da Vinci exhibit at the museum this morning. & what a blessing, to say I was at a Da Vinci exhibit this morning. & he was a pacifist who designed killing machines, for money always comes from warlords. & he, who like no other knew of the divine proportions of the body, & he who preferred to trace limbs & ligaments & the glide of bat wings in the air, he who preferred the theater, & the projector, & the drum, & bridges, imagined the machine gun & the submarine, & the tank, sculpted a bullet with a more precise dance. & oh how the mind bends & how light & shadows fall. & you, young dancer, tell me, what do you know of the flight of birds, & of the difference between theatricality & war, dissection & witchcraft, dance & death? & were you searching for your Palestine in Damascus, for your Damascus in Beirut, & were you looking for Allah in the joint, the spine, the twirl? & that last scribble your body made in the air, was that you, & were you trying to write backwards, to lift instead? & did you? Tell me, are the mountains blue in the distance? & does poetry matter, & does dance? & is there a bridge where the displaced go after they’re gone?

Here, as always in the poetry of Zeina Hashem Beck the world pliés before us in all of its ruthless beauty and terror. Hashem Beck does more than merely commemorate the life and mourn the loss of Hassan Rabeh in this poem. She articulates the endless adhan of art. She proclaims our ummah as everywhere, on the round earth’s imagined corners, where a poem might begin to take shape, to be uttered, heard, and remembered.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

July 01, 2017

DD: I’d like to start by quoting the last five lines from Jim Harrison’s poem, “Books,” published posthumously in Dead Man’s Float:

I must sell these books, some quite rare, or exchange them for good food and the wine I can no longer afford. I used to look at pages 33, 77, 153 for the secrets of the world and never find them but still continue trying.

Could you use these lines as a jumping off point for discussing the good work you do as a publicist at Copper Canyon Press?

KF: Ha! What a great line from Harrison to start our conversation. I am the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon, which means that I work to get our authors and their books print and broadcast media coverage. Because Copper Canyon is a nonprofit, part of my job also involves working to increase the visibility of our donor campaigns and reader engagement programming.

EG: As Copper Canyon’s Associate Publicist, I manage the press’s digital footprint — primarily on social media. Social media serves to amplify press coverage for our books and authors, support the press’s development initiatives, and help build relationships with our community of readers and the literary community at large. The digital landscape is always changing and it’s my job to keep up, so there’s a lot of answer-seeking and not-finding and then continuing-to-try; that’s part of the fun.

DD: Jim Harrison’s Dead Man’s Float and C.D. Wright’s ShallCross are both amazing books, capstones to admirable lives in poetry and the arts. Do you see the marketing of these books differently than other books? Could you say that your work as a publicist in these cases is also to elegize and to praise?

KF: My role as a literary publicist is to advocate for poetry, and to shout from the rooftops when we get a beautiful collection in our hands. Both of these books are capstones, and that is an important quality that I took into consideration when we developed the publicity campaigns. They were handled with care, and both went out to reviewers with Letters from the Editor, contextualizing the work and honoring the legacies of the poets. The coverage they received was predominantly focused on the poetry itself, with remembrances and retrospectives woven in.

EG: Elegizing both Jim and C.D. felt in the wake of their passing more like an organic, communal act of which the press is only a part. Spending as much of my time plugged into online conversation as I do, it was incredible to witness the chorus of so many voices — writers, readers, academics, students, family, friends — sharing with the digital world the impact these poets had on their lives and their work. ShallCross and Dead Man’s Float naturally became important touchstones for this collective eulogizing. Ongoing eulogizing, really; I don’t know that the world will run out of things to say about either of these poets any time soon.

DD: What do poets most need to know about publicizing a book of poetry, in your opinion?

KF: I think poets should know that social media is a crucial part of how readers discover new books today. Online reviews, literary journals that publish their issues digitally, and presses that help celebrate its authors accomplishments through Twitter and Facebook, are all part of the publicity process. It’s also important to have an author website for readers to learn more about you. I think that a lot of poets don’t believe that mainstream media is engaged in poetry, and in some cases, it isn’t — but in many circumstances, reviewers and editors are taking note of poetry and looking for ways to celebrate it.

DD: How important is an author’s use of social media and overall web presence in publicizing a book?

EG: Generally speaking, I think the importance of a particular poet’s online presence is proportional to the importance of that presence to their readers. As a publicist, you want a book and its readers to find each other, so if a poet’s readers – actual and potential – are online, I think it makes a measurable impact if the poet is online too.

There are always exceptions, of course, and I wouldn’t push a poet to jump into the digital abyss if they’re not going to feel okay about being there. Managing a social media presence takes time and energy, and it’s publicly performative so it can drain your reservoir of self (hi, introverts!). A poet’s primary responsibility is to write poetry, so if Twitter takes away from that instead of feeds it, I respect the choice say “pass.” (That’s part of why I do the job I do: so poets can poem first.) But if social media fits comfortably into a poet’s life, their use of social media can really help make space for their book in the world and find the readers who’re going to love it.

DD: Since the last time Kelly was interviewed for this blog, by Nin Andrews, in 2012, Copper Canyon Press has launched several initiatives to raise funds and increase the variety of poets it publishes. One such initiative is the New Poets Project. Could you tell us a bit about this project and Javier Zamora’s new collection?

EG: The New Poets Project campaign used crowdfunding to raise funds for debut poetry collections by extraordinary voices like Zamora’s. Copper Canyon is a platform for both established and emerging poets, and for the latter, debut books can be the critical jumping-off point for long-ranging careers and can carry a lasting impact in the poetry world. We’re invested in the power of these debut books and the poets who write them – poets like Camille Rankine, and Ocean Vuong and Javier Zamora. It was great to see the literary community rally around these writers.

The emotional ground that Unaccompanied covers is remarkable. There’s a physical journey embedded in the book – an incredibly compelling one – but the internal landscape Zamora explores is equally rich and deeply considered. The sense of urgency in these poems sticks with me after I read them, too.

DD: Camille Rankine’s poetry seeks to propel the passive reader into active and aggressive questioning. With intense lyricism, Incorrect Merciful Impulsescharts the anxieties, the blindness, and the perplexities characteristic of urban life in contemporary America. Compassion foregrounds Rankine’s poetic inquiry into the confluence of identity, history, politics, mortality, and culture, in a nation endlessly implicated in violence, domestically and overseas. To me, this book is emblematic of the timely and timeless quality of Copper Canyon books. Which books recently published by Copper Canyon Press resonate most deeply with you in these dark political times?

KF: One could (and has) made the argument that all poetry is political. See: this, or this.

But as far as specific Copper Canyon titles that have resonated with me (in addition to Camille’s collection), these would make the shortlist (among many others):

DD: Kelly, your digital chapbook, Helix, is available online at Floating Wolf Quarterly. I enjoyed the lyric intensity of this collection. The first four lines of the title poem were particularly emblematic of the strengths of the chapbook as a whole:

That you may have been small, gene. A tiny cross of parental freeways. Little fragment of extended tastes: likes, dislikes, hair color, eyes. That our thrills could be found in the departure—

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

KF: My work at Copper Canyon Press has changed my life. Hands-down: as a writer, reader, and a professional. I think I am probably a more sensitive marketing professional because I’m also a poet (actually I’m going through my own “first book” publishing process with Coffee House Press right now). So there are some insights I definitely try to apply to my job — about how vulnerable it can be to publish a book — for all poets regardless of their experience or publication history.

As far as how working at Copper Canyon as a publicist has influenced me as a poet: it has exposed me to so many different styles and types of poetry, and through that exposure I have experimented, imitated, reconsidered, and re-imagined, my own writing. I read many manuscripts throughout the year in order to prepare PR plans, sometimes multiple books a week, and often in raw form without final edits or revisions. This is a practice that has affected my vocabulary, my understanding of lineation, my theory on titling poems...the list could go on.

DD: Emily, I love your prose poem, “The Rabbit,” which appeared in the New Delta Review. It manages to be playful and new and to deeply engage Francis Ponge’s work at the same time. The poem ends wonderfully:

Rabbit, I think I am saying I would vote for you if only I had a better grasp of your platform.

Rabbit, I think, if you were my father, we’d go out to lunch every week and despite our labored conversation, I’d kiss your furry cheek before I hurried out of your car.

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

EG: Thank you for such a kind reading of “The Rabbit!”

Surrounded by the work of incredible poets at Copper Canyon, I’m both inspired and daunted, moved to write and stunned into silence. Consuming good poetry is nourishing to me as poet: it feeds me rhythms I want to borrow and phrases I obsess over and forms I want to play in and new ways of being that I want to inhabit for a while. It wakes me up to the world again so I can write about it. But it also greases the machine of self-doubt; it feels like I’m always navigating this push and pull – a healthy tension, I like to think.

The flow of influence in the other direction is less fraught: my life as a writer serves as a welcome source of empathy for me as a publicist working with other writers. I can’t fully inhabit every poet’s experience, of course, but I can honor the vulnerability and bravery of what they’ve done to craft a book through the careful attention I give that book, and through the work I do that helps that book make its mark, because I’ve felt that vulnerability myself. I value my own experience as a point of reference in that sense.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as a publicist?

KF: It is really gratifying to see sold-out readings or lectures, rooms packed with people waiting to listen to poets read their work.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

KF: It needs more readers.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

EG: Can I cheat a bit in my response? The first and truest-feeling answer that came to my mind in response to this excellent question isn’t quite a poem but words from a poet: Audre Lorde’s well-known assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I carry those words around with me and visit them often. They call me out, they move me forward, they teach me and inspire me and feed a fire under threat. These words name the world; they’re the lens I need to really see it. I want to keep that close.

KF: My poem would be W.S. Merwin’s “Variation on a Theme,” from his collection Moon Before Morning, and it will also appear in The Essential Merwin this Fall 2017. The line: “thank you whole body and hand and eye / thank you for sights and moments known.”

DD: Speaking of W.S. Merwin, I’d like to end with a poem from the remarkable Garden Time; “The Present” is maybe the most Blakean poem in a very satisfyingly Blakean collection:

The Present

As they were leaving the garden one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is or what it is for what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it but you will not be able

to keep anything yet they both reached at once

for the present and when their hands met

they laughed

Kelly Forsythe is the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon Press. Prior to working with Copper Canyon, she was a consultant for the web team at the Poetry Foundation, and worked with the marketing department at Poets & Writers Magazine. She has given lectures on publishing and book publicity at NYU, The Academy of American Poets, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Manhattanville College. Her publicity endeavors at Copper Canyon include Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda. She is on the Board of Directors for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and the author of Perennial, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. In addition to her work with Copper Canyon, she edits Phantom, an online journal, and teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. Photo: Janessa Jackson

Emily Grise serves as Associate Publicist for Copper Canyon Press and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Previously, she served as an Assistant Editor for Natural Bridge and a reviews writer for DIALOGIST, and is currently Associate Poetry Editor for WomenArts Quarterly — a St. Louis-based art and literary journal which features work by womyn artists. She teaches creative writing for pre-teens with the St. Louis Writers Workshop. Photo: Tim Young

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

June 19, 2017

Lauren Marie Schmidt’s newest collection of poetry, Filthy Labors, roars with boundless defiant empathy on every page. For Schmidt, poetry is earned communion, restorative utterance, the expression of a belief in a secular, music-bound, Eucharistic reality underwriting daily life, an affirmation of the fact that our mutual individual brokenness, made manifest in the word, is what constitutes true communion. The poems in Filthy Labors draw their inspiration from Schmidt’s work as a poetry instructor at The Haven House for Homeless Women and Children; Schmidt also draws on her personal family history, exploring the difficult affections and the dense connective tissues that bind generations together, and often tear us apart inside. Schmidt arranges the poems in Filthy Labors around six of the seven Catholic sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Orders; she leaves out Marriage, an omission that felicitously underscores the collection’s commitment to gender equity and female agency in the face of a rabidly misogynistic culture. Each poem in this collection works as an outward sign of an inward grace (the grace is love, emblazoned with the hard-fought duende of Schmidt’s tremendous heart). Filthy Labors posits a sacramental view of the world, unmoored from the false trappings and mystifications of organized religion. Schmidt’s only prophet and priest is Whitman, with his call and response: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?/ I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,/ In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.”

Filthy Labors sees clearly the face of a young father running for miles after his daughter’s errant kite, the neck of a homeless mother with “Justice” tattooed on it, the face of a man changing his elderly father’s soiled underwear, a woman named Milagros breathing Spanish in her daughter’s ear, the faces of mothers blooming on the eternal verge of struggle, pain, fear, defiance, rebirth. Schmidt evokes the wounds and truths of the many worlds she has passed through. She deftly moves between forms and registers, exploring the limits of the ghazal and the pantoum, unafraid to shift from the vernacular to the vatic. Schmidt also bravely explores her own privilege and blindness, as she poignantly does in “The English Teacher Gets a Lesson in Inference,”

You got any kids? Dionna asks. No, I say, I don’t have any kids.

You ever been pregnant? I don’t have any kids, so…

That ain’t the question that I asked you, she says.

Then she folds her arms across her chest and waits for me to answer.

Schmidt’s poetry, here and everywhere else in this collection, calls us into radical sympathy with others, grounded in the conviction that poetry might shine and quench and slip its tongue between our lips and pray. Filthy Labors is the product of far more than mere astute observation fused to talent and training. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s work never wavers in its commitment to the connections that occur off the page, in the air around a dinner table, in the common room of The Haven House, in all havens and the unsafe spaces between.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

May 15, 2017

Susan Lewis’s new collection of prose poems engages the complex routines and the constantly shifting contours of daily life in the twenty-first century with great humor, terror, anger, and insight. Like Kafka, like Borges, Lewis explores the uncertainties that underwrite a life, and that linger in the margins of the page; from such uncertainties, and from the chaos embroidered into the antimacassars of the quotidian, Lewis’s prose poems present themselves as an endless gallery of rooms wherein one might dwell on the raging absurdities and the gentle profundities of existence. In these poems, Lewis introduces a man overwhelmed by the complexity of most things, refugees from the native urban clatter, a god of guilt trying to sharpen the curvatures of space-time, a girl who knows her waking life is an illusion, figures sidling into their lives like shy crabs, motivations stunted, discourses un-tongued, the logic of the stutter-step and the sucker punch, the language of bureaucracy colliding with medusa-headed vernaculars and scientific lexicons. Lewis’s ultimate subject, however, is the protean, indeterminate, baffling conundrum of the self, the mystery and multiplicity of our own individual discrete interior worlds.

For Susan Lewis, the prose poem provides a frame within which passionate inwardness and exteriority might overlap, exchange places, negate each other, and continue their distinct pinprick shinings. These poems take form in the interstices of desire, “caught between reciprocity & the cutting edge,” providing glimpses of a “braided interior, veiled though it remained by a haze of evasion.” At their best, the poems startle and skitter, nimbly shifting stances between sentences, darting between parable and parabola—acidic, exquisite, and surreal in the way that only the waking world can be surreal. The poem, “A Variable Equation,” is characteristic in its method; the poem reads, in full:

"This one had a weeping cat. In fact, he was a cat himself, when the notion struck him. He could leap from pool to pool like raindrops. When the pair of them cried, the earth beneath them shuddered, from pleasure or impatience. One day the cat’s tears dried up. It lay still becoming something else. Its man never found out who had ordered the new body, but he knew then & there he must get one like it. You could say he lorded it over his pet, but it was the cat become moonbeam which nurtured him before he had a self to speak of."

Like a cat become moonbeam it is impermanence that nurtures these poems and moves them rapidly outward. Heisenberg’s Salon offers poems that are by turns cosmopolitan and sage, wry and idiosyncratic, eccentric and expertly executed. Each poem here creates a home for another—newer, stranger, older, atomized—way of life. Susan Lewis exposes the flux within the habitual, the unruliness of the very molecules within the customary; these outlandish internal geometries vanish and reappear as the ever-shifting furniture of the self.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

May 05, 2017

DR: Before Lithic I was a geologist, an astronomer, and a teacher of earth and space science. Lithic means, pertaining to stone. Long before I became a geologist, my Dad was the poet of the family, so the possibility of poetry has always been about. I wrote a poem in second grade that gave me a good feeling. I wrote a poem in 1992, another in 1994, then they started coming more frequently. About 12 or 15 years ago, I became close with Jack Mueller, a lifelong constant poet-maker with deep knowledge and strong presence. He is a prolific trickster. As Hank Stamper might say, he'll “never give a inch.” Jack was a fixture in San Francisco in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, with Ginsberg, Corso, Doyle, Hirschman, Cherkovski, and the ongoing gang. He is a mountain (in the house at the top of the hill at the end of the road.) Thousands of 3X5 cards and bar napkins with rapidly sketched cartoons, sharpened by fast comment, piled on the dining room table. They captivated me. “Let's make a book of these napkins!” That became, Whacking the Punch Line, and that was the beginning of the Lith.

Lithic Press started taking off about two years ago when I hired Kyle Harvey to do design and layout work. Kyle is a beautiful human: multi-talented, motivated, poet-musician-artist, and a brilliant designer! It is amazing to work with him! Lithic would not be what it is without him.

DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Lithic poets share in common?

DR: Our catalog has about 30 titles from 20 writers. A little more than half are chappies, the others, perfect-bound longer collections. With the idea of creating rare books, we've done a couple of cloth-bound, numbered, Limited Editions (Jack Mueller's, The Gate, and Kierstin Bridger's, Demimonde.) There is one anthology, Going Down Grand, Poems from the Canyon, that includes poems from more than 50 writers, and a couple of cartoon books, collections of Jack’s, compression sketches, along with, Whacking..., there is, Who Said Hawaii? I can imagine publishing books on Natural History or really anything that becomes obvious to make.

As far as I know, all Lithic writers put their pants on one leg at a time. I’m attracted to writers who pay attention to language in addition to any feelings, destinations, or particular sympathies. In all our books, I find some essence of existence, some insight, some play that makes the journey more stimulating.

An overriding thought that Mueller has ground into me and his many minions is, Obey Emerging Form, which comes to him directly from his acquaintance with Robert Duncan, and the importance he gave Olson’s thoughts on projective verse. The idea has grown in me, transcends my writing, leads me to drill, bolt and hang rocks from ceilings and trees... led me to open a bookstore. I look for manuscripts that obey emerging form.

DD: Can you talk about the importance of your bookstore?

DR: Books take my breath away, always have. I still see myself in the library as a kid, looking up at all the shelves. As I struggled to write a report, the night before it was due, I couldn’t fathom how all those books could have been written: so many words, sentences, paragraphs, page after page. It was magic. Still is. I’ve always loved to be among books, each one a little universe. Or a multiverse. Or just one good verse. I have Montaigne pinned on the wall,

“...I never travel without books in peace or in war. Yet many days or months go by without my using them. Meanwhile, time runs by and is gone ... you cannot imagine how much ease and comfort I draw from the thought that they are beside me...”

The bookstore has exposed rafters from which I hang rocks, pine poles, beaver-chewed willow sticks, globes of planets, asteroids, books, and who knows what’s next! Trilobites crawl across the counter. There are spinning chunks of basalt and rocks that hang up from the floor. The bookstore is a classroom, a field trip destination for school groups, a community center, a meeting place, an art gallery. We have frequent poetry readings, scientific talks, and music shows. It’s a thinker’s hangout. I ran a planetarium for many years, the bookstore is an extension of that.

Located in a small town on the western side of a western state, on the 2nd floor of The Old Bank Building, a block off the main drag, in a country whose president doesn’t read too much, business is best during our events. I’m optimistic, our name is spreading, drop-in traffic is increasing.

DD: Could you tell us about some of the titles forthcoming in 2017 from Lithic Press?

DR: We had an open reading last year for chapbook submissions, and three chappies are soon to come out from Karl Plank, Trish Hopkinson, and Kevin Carey. Four or five other chappies will come out this year. In addition to Adam's Stray, we’ll have four additional longer length poetry collections, including, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, by Eugene, Oregon poet, Sam Roxas-Chua. In a break from tradition we’ll be publishing a chapbook of non-fiction by John Fayhee called, Driving Around the West with Drugs. We are also going to re-issue Jack Mueller's, Whacking the Punch Line, as a coloring book for grown-ups. All the titles are in the catalog on our website, here.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

DR: The first full-length collection I did with Lithic was Jack Mueller's, Amor Fati, which started with paper-clipped and stapled, crumpled piles of papers and manuscripts stacked on the milieu of Jack’s dining room table. Molding that into a book, in the thunder and wonder of Jack’s arguments with himself, was hugely invigorating. It took four years. I sent it to The Boss. Three years later it looks well worn on his desk. A major theme in Springsteen’s recent autobiography is indeed, amor fati.

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

DR: Before Lithic Press began to grow, there was about ten years during which I had a lot of very quiet time. I ran an observatory in southern Africa. I worked at night. The days were free, there were giraffes out the window, I tracked zebra and rhino, spent days on the hillside with the baboons, hyenas were about at night. The sky, the land, my friends... were all new. Time moved slow. My home in Colorado is a sanctuary. There is an observatory, beaver ponds, birds of prey, coyotes at night. I live with dogs. I’ve been blessed with enough nothing to get something done. Since I opened the bookstore, poems come less frequently than before (but I did get published! My, Primate Poems, came out late last year.)

I love facilitating the making of books. But as a publisher, I’ve had a glimpse of something of a mania among writers, and anyone who has ever written anything, to ‘have a book.’ Maybe it’s related to celebrity culture and the urge toward ‘fame.’ It can be ugly. I want to work with writers who write because they can’t help but to write. Books, for them, obviously need to be made. While writing remains important to me, I take my poems as they come and don’t worry too much at the time that passes in between. I don’t force it. As so many have said, I am a poet - when I am writing a poem. Otherwise, I am just another chump looking at the stars, paying taxes, dusting the shelves... I am attracted to writers who have vibrant connections with the world - beyond writing.

DD: Could you introduce Adam’s work and discuss the strengths of Stray?

DR: “Solitude's Best Apprentice” is the title of first poem in this collection. It details the mastery Adam’s father displayed with woodworking tools, making something from ‘nothing.’ Adam’s work is like his father’s hand on the chisel. Every poem is finely wrought with attention to detail, knowledge built from long apprenticeship, and a helpless desire for the work.

These poems are written from the inside out, like a Kesey novel, and like in a Kesey novel, I am drawn to what I do not know. I might get the names over time, stumble on dark paths, take sure steps with sharpened knives, severed ties, lies, and all kinds of unsaid. His longer poems are explorations from some honed place to wherever. He wanders. He remains open to ‘begging home a stray’ - up in Ralls - where I’ve never been but it feels familiar. Adam’s book looks to the north and walks off. He is a husband. His short poems are a fist. He has a glacial scar carved on his whorl.

In the Lith, above my head, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead hangs from the ceiling on 24 gauge silver wire. The 1954 cloth-bound edition had been gnawed off the shelf and partially buried next to the compost pit by my book-loving bitch, Luckie. It hangs just above the bar table. I have to sit up straight to read from it (who sits up straight these days?) Randomly I find,

“...It often seems to me that European man was at his best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualization. We educated people have our aesthetic sense too highly cultivated and do not come to beauty simply enough...”

DD: The sonnet, the near sonnet, and a kind of nonce sonnet punctuate Stray. In a way, this is the phantom form underwriting the collection. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with this form?

AH: I really like the verb “punctuate” here. I think of received forms as a way to address tradition, to offer a small aside to the arc of where we’ve been and where we might be going. For me, the sonnet makes sense. It’s elastic, it’s flexible, and it can stretch gracefully and with resonance. It’s a way for me to organize my thoughts. Thematically, there’s a lot of, well, straying, physically, spiritually, emotionally—we stray from obligations, from duties, from love, from home, but I like that there are formal returns in the collection, which I hope echo in sound and sense from one poem to another. That underwriting you mention serves as a ghost refrain of sorts. Each poem is a crafted thing, but, once I started really considering how all the poems were in discussion with one another, I realized how a collection, too, is a crafted thing; it’s curated, tweaked, and shaped. I found a lot of comfort and joy and frustration and doubt in that process, and the sonnet and its looser relatives—the “Staring Down” couplets, too—offered touchstones for the shape the collection ultimately took.

I think of poems in general and received forms in particular as balancing authenticity and artifice. They’re crafted and structured to highlight the appearance of spontaneity, to feel necessary, and that they could not be otherwise. There’s a tautness in working toward authenticity and artifice, a fundamental tension, that I enjoy, and I find real satisfaction in reading poems that navigate and explore those concerns. So I tried to write the sort of poems I like reading.

DD: The pronounced influence of a Catholic upbringing shines through in many of the poems in this collection. Could you talk about the connections between Catholic culture, faith, and poetry?

AH: Being a cradle Catholic gives life a shape whether you want it or not, and, like the sonnet or poems in general, offers places to dwell, rooms for us to knock around in for a while before bustling back into the world. For me, being raised Catholic provided way stations for my days, big and small rituals that marked time passing and gave that time meaning and shape: the rosary, for one, but also the larger rituals, the events that celebrated transitions from one phase of life to another, Baptism, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation. Those are stylized moves, rich in circumstance and filled with gesture and longing. The ritual expresses and evokes, enacts and points toward the hope for structures that transcend. Catholicism was the vehicle for these concerns, but that’s a circumstance of geography and history, a chance happening. It certainly could have been otherwise, but it wasn’t otherwise. I can’t undo that. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my Catholicism, no matter how lapsed still fires off in my synapses, it’s baked in and feels nearly genetic. In all my thoughts and feelings and approaches, the Church, in both positive and negative ways, has its say. And, for me, I find that poems have something of that structure that brought comfort and meaning and expression when I was growing up. I’m not glib about those tensions. Poems are rituals unto themselves. When poems are working well, they’re living chambers with intricacies and shapes—sonic, formal, rhetorical, metaphorical—, but they’re also expanses with possible selves and ambiguities shaped consciously and unconsciously, but shaped with intelligent hearts and empathetic minds. Those are the ones I want to write, and they’re the ones I want to read and reread and tape to people’s doors when they’re not looking.

I’m not a good Catholic in the way my grandmother would define it. I’ve not gone to Mass in a couple years, I’m ragged with doubts, and there is much that I find challenging. That said, the sense of wonder and awe in my gut, the realization that the world can be one place of majesty and terror, profound humaneness and abject cruelty, strikes me as a particularly spiritual issue. On the other hand, the Winter Daphne’s in bloom, and the Camellias are too. And there are swing sets and a broken down garbage truck and a fundamental collapse of political obligation to serve from below and to do so with sincerity and decency and intelligence. Those tilt-a-whirl scales have been slamming around for a long time, and we’re all of it. Poems, for me at least, can offer a shape to that. Poems, like religious belief, like ritual, can offer distillation and elevation and attention. They’re also “the things of this world” and I like to think of us all as Wilbur’s heaviest nuns working on our difficult balance.

DD: Who are the poets that have influenced you the most?

AH: I take something from almost everything I read. I love reading Frost’s North of Boston, flipping through Pound’s Pisan Cantos and seeing what sticks. I find Cummings’s Tulips & Chimneys, especially the five parts of “Chansons Innocentes,” influencing my thoughts quite a bit. I read a lot of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I return to Harmonium, too. Plath’s bee poems, Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, those are important to me, too. CK Williams, the early stuff especially, and Philip Levine, the gritty gentleness I found there stuck with me. I read Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires and Refusing Heaven probably more times than I should have.

DD: What contemporary poets do you most admire?

AH: First, I’d be faithless and unkind if I didn’t say how much I admire the poet-mentors at NMU and TTU who worked with me. You hear stories about negligent faculty, and maybe you see some of it, too, but that was not my experience when it came to talking poems, getting feedback on my work, getting suggestions for places to submit, and the like. And the fellow students I worked with at both places were supportive, motivating, and talented. In those ways, I’ve been very fortunate.

I also admire, in no particular order, Frannie Lindsay, David Bottoms, Robert Morgan, Sarah Lindsay, Connie Wanek, Martha Serpas, Peter Everwine, Lance Larsen, and Christian Wiman. I heard Ross Gay read “Nursery” a while back, and it’s never left my ear. I like Steve Scafidi’s work, too. Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods was a revelation as was Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious. Karen Skolfield’s Frost in the Low Areas, the title poem especially, is excellent. I also enjoy Alberto Ríos’s work. Edward Hirsch’s Special Orders comes to mind, as does Thomas Lynch’s Walking Papers. I also admire Terrence Hayes. He was in a small town one over last year, and his talk meant a lot to me.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

AH: There’s a ton of room to write in terms of form and content. I find good poems all over the place, and I don’t know if they’ll be historically good, but that’s not the point. They’re good right now, and I like reading them. Maybe in five years I’ll cringe at those same poems I liked so much. But that’s taste and maturity and whatever else goes into our critical faculties. The poetry landscape seems to be okay with itself, and the mountains, deserts, swamps, cities, burgs, and towns are livable. Auden talked about reading work he knows isn’t very good but that he liked—it was his time, though, so what’s the problem? I read Verse Daily and Poetry Daily most mornings and subscribe to some lit mags, and I’m dazzled and moved and energized by the variety. I have critical assessment, of course, and I rank and sort and stop reading if I don’t like something, but I don’t get too severe about it. The stakes are high, they’re very high, but the importance of poems in my life won’t be made more meaningful by severity or exclusionary reactions. If I don’t like something, I stop reading. I might come back to it. I might not. I like wondering which poems being written now will last and be loved years and years from now. Cases can be made, I guess, but I can spend my time better by supporting the work I love. I think the variety we see is a sign of health, a realization of the importance of poetry in our lives.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

AH: Meaningful engagement with and support from our communities. I’d like to see more opportunities for poets in public schools or running workshops in rural communities and to have those events recognized as essential to the well-being of the community, not anomalous or cute. That’s close to me. I live in rural South Carolina and got to work with students on a Saturday workshop where we studied haiku, traditional and contemporary, discussing how image can work, how it expresses and evokes, how it suggests. That was a meaningful day; we had a lot of fun, but it was more than that. We slowed down. We read. We talked. We wrote. We wrangled with our responses, and, in doing so, we tried to make a shape for those responses. There are instrumental values there, skills that transfer to other aspects of our lives. But that’s a lucky by-product. It is inherently worthwhile to read carefully, to consider a poem on its own merits, and to respond in a community to your thoughts on the matter. It’s a way of thinking and feeling. And poetry adds real value to our lives. I have this little story in my mind of two state troopers sidled up to each other in their Interceptors in the median of a state road, driver’s side window to driver’s side window the way they do, exchanging well-read poetry collections.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

AH: Milton’s Paradise Lost. For a few reasons: I could win friends and gain influence by having marathon recitations. I could run for office, win, and recite it as a filibuster, providing explication as needed, sort of like Patton Oswalt’s Star Wars filibuster but way more serious. Lame joke aside: Paradise Lost is audacious and ambitious and so satisfying to read. Almost every line is worth our attention.

DD: I’d like to end with the poem “To the Bed Bug.” This poem surprised and delighted me. For me, it gently evokes John Donne’s flea. Could you introduce this poem?

DR: I asked my old climbing buddy, Smeds, if he felt bad squashing the skeeters. He said he didn't like the killing but when they marched on his territory it was war.

Reading Donne’s, “The Flea,” is to listen in on some impassioned reasoning from 400 years ago. Reading it gave me a headache (behind my right eye.) Oh, darling, just smoosh the damned thing already and take my heart. But what a glimpse into the ways of the days of way back when: those manners, the intricate speech patterns, all the fluffy frilleries, same goddamned insects.

Adam’s “little buddy” could be seen as playful pondering. What will they say 400 years hence when this Bed Bug is encountered? Perhaps it will sooth a headache and cause a yearning for this high time: it displays an openness to fun, such easy speech, such an indication of freedom to wander where thought will roam - with such nuanced insight, same hot blood.

TO THE BED BUG

Little buddy chugging innocuously enough beneath my cotton sock,

tag-a-long armed with anticoagulant and an endless gut,

welcome to me, a humble type-O host. My blood is your blood,

eh, ami? Or is it amie? Classy, aren’t I? Urbane and friendly,

worrying French gender that way. You’re worth it, best lesson in commensalism.

I get you. I’ve taken the orphan’s clingy ride with style, rendered myself

immune to all but need. I, like you, work to keep a bleeder gently bleeding.

Danny Rosen founded Lithic Press in 2008, and the Lithic Bookstore & Gallery in 2015. His book, Primate Poems, came out in 2016. The chappie, Ghosts of Giant Kudu, came out in 2013 from Kattywompus Press. Danny’s genetically based optimism is arises from his familiarity with deep time and big space. He worked in geology, astronomy, and for many years ran the Western Sky Planetarium, providing astronomy education for schools and communities throughout western Colorado.

Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Hayden’sFerryReview, and elsewhere. Claudia Emerson selected his work for Best New Poets 2010. Nominated for both a Pushcart and for Best of the Net, he was also a semi-finalist for the Boston Review/“Discovery” Prize and a finalist for the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry. He earned a PhD from Texas Tech and currently lives in Darlington, South Carolina with writer and editor Landon Houle.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

At first glance, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s new collection of poetry, What Blooms in Winter, has little in common with David Lehman’s recently published Poems in the Manner Of. Mazziotti Gillan’s collection maintains the thematic and aesthetic continuity that runs throughout her body of work; Mazziotti Gillan, here, as everywhere else in her work, earnestly relates the life story of a working class daughter of immigrants, growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who made a place for herself in the poetry world. Lehman’s newest collection, on the other hand, catalogs the poet’s influences and enthusiasms, providing a series of nimble homages to the writers who have been fellow travelers on the road from An Alternative to Speech to The Best American Poetry 2017. While Lehman’s protean cosmopolitanism might jangle against Mazziotti Gillan’s homespun emotional éclat, both What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of share the distinction of being finely wrought collections by poets whose contributions to the nation as teachers, organizers, anthologists, and supporters of the arts are inestimably great.

In many respects, David Lehman’s Poems in the Manner Of serves as a companion volume to his recently published The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry 1988-2014. If The State of the Art scans, with tremendous discernment, the bright stars and the penumbras of the contemporary American poetry scene, then Poems in the Manner Of directs a similarly acuminous gaze at the poet’s own personal canon. The poems in Poems are more than mere stylistic imitations of poets that Lehman admires; Poems in the Manner Of reads as the compendium of affections and predilections that have steered a life in poetry. In a sense that runs parallel to the lyric narrative chronicling of a lifetime unfolding in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s work, Poems functions as a spiritual autobiography, a grand map of misreading, a pheasant disappearing in the brush, a search for the inexplicable, a renovation of experience, a purging of the world’s poverty and change and evil and death. Lehman frames the poems in this collection with prose that often further illuminates the intimate resonances carried in the lines. For example, Lehman prefaces “Goethe’s Nightsong” with the following remarks: “My father, who arrived in the United States as a refugee from Hiter’s Germany, used to recite this German poem by heart with an uncanny gleam in his eyes. It has often been translated but never, to my mind, satisfactorily.” The poem, a translation of “Wandrers Nachtlied,” reads:

Over the hills Comes the quiet. Across the treetops No breeze blows. Not a sound: even the small Birds in the woods are quiet. Just wait: soon you Will be quiet, too.

Lehman includes several other translations in Poems, of Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, and (loosely, but most entertainingly) Max Jacobs. Each translation signals a deep encounter with the poem in question, a further implicit elaboration of Lehman’s aesthetic stance and tastes.

In addition to translations, Poems in the Manner Of includes among other forms, the cento, the prose poem, a Dylanesque rock ballad, a Jazz standard, and a poem in the shape of a multiple-choice test (on Freud). Throughout the collection, Lehman interrogates as he reverences—Lehman’s poetry, here, is a species of criticism—the work of Catullus, Li Po, Lady Murasaki, Shakespeare, Bashō, Christopher Smart, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Rimbaud, Cavafy, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Rilke, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Kafka, Millay, Parker, Moore, García Lorca, Michaux, Hemingway, Borges, Neruda, Auden, Lowell, Brooks, Bukowski, Plath, Sontag, Koch, and O’Hara. A love of the silver screen (and the Great American Songbook) runs like a discrete tributary through the long list of writers Lehman honors in these poems. Also, running through these poems at every turn is Lehman’s own adventurous, gregarious, indefatigable life in poetry. This is a life that celebrates equally “the smell of Galouises and Gitanes sans filtre,” “the taste of white nectarines in upstate New York,” the prose of James Joyce, the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the way that Manhattan felt in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s. David Lehman’s life as a poet, as a scholar, as an educator, has been one turned outward on the world, characterized by generosity and an overriding passion for the written word, by an unrelenting wonder and a simple desire to understand the complicated celestial mechanics of poetry. Poems in the Manner Of continues Lehman’s poetic project, gathering paradise, one grain of sand, one universe, one wildflower, at a time.

Like David Lehman, Maria Mazziotti Gillan has tirelessly promoted the work of countless poets and writers. As the director of The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, as the editor of the Paterson Literary Review, as the head of the Creative Writing department at Binghamton University, and, overall, as a champion of community outreach through poetry, Mazziotti Gillan has spent her life nurturing literary talent and encouraging young writers of all ages to find a home on the page. What Blooms in Winter continues the stylistic and thematic patterns that have been Mazziotti Gillan’s hallmark for the last four decades; Mazziotti Gillan’s is a poetry of endlessly expanding democratic vistas, grounded in, and forever returning to, the Riverside neighborhood of Paterson during the fifties and sixties. Taken as a whole, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry obsessively confronts her experience coming to terms with her hyphenated identity and her working class origins. As the poet Joe Weil has noted, Mazziotti Gillan’s poems aspire to the aria; and like the aria, each poem needs to be considered as part of an operatic whole. These poems are her biancheria, her embroidery work, homemade, artful, delicate, her dowry for future generation; as Gillan says, in the poem “The Lace Tablecloth and the Patterns of Memory”: “all the people I have loved are tucked away/ carefully in my mind, so that I can lift them out/ and remember and be comforted.” Not only does poetry comfort, for Gillan it restores. Each poem in Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work represents a Whitmanesque attempt to chronicle her own American journey as the daughter of Italian immigrants.

Although Mazziotti Gillan’s poems often alternate between contemplating love and loss, grief and joy, pride and shame, these emotional tropes merely provide the backdrop for her exploration of how the mind and the heart constitute themselves in any given act of recollection. In this sense, her poetic project runs parallel to the English Romantics, particularly Wordsworth. Also, like William Blake, Maria Mazziotti Gillan would agree that “a tear is an intellectual thing.” The intellect and the emotions overlap and intermingle in all of her poetry. What Blooms in Winter retraces the subject matter that Mazziotti Gillan has obsessively confronted throughout her body of work: the poverty of her early childhood, the experience of growing up as “a good Italian girl,” the concerns of motherhood, family, death, love, and the complicated miracle of remembering all that is no longer present. Like Mazziotti Gillan’s recent collections Ancestors’ Song and The Silence in an Empty House, What Blooms in Winter also contains many poems about travel, and topical poems about an earthquake in Nepal, terrorist attacks in France, and Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Most surprising in this collection, however, are the short lyric poems that haven’t featured prominently in Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry since her early books. “Dream Sequence,” for example, reads in full:

I imagine moving under green water as though I could breathe without an airtank.

I am a silver fish and imagine goldfish gliding past without noticing me,

and I, my body suddenly free of awkwardness, move with such grace, I could be

a young girl again, lithe and slender, as though I had been born to inhabit this world

like the sea creatures, my body shimmering in the watery dark.

This gorgeous, lithe, alacritous ten line poem stands in apt counterpoint to the torrential approach of the typical Mazziotti Gillan poem. Poetry, for Maria Mazziotti Gillan, offers a way to inhabit this world, despite the reality of pain, suffering, and death; gracefully, once again in What Blooms in Winter, this poet butterflies the dark.

Reading What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of back to back during National Poetry Month 2017, I am reminded most forcefully of the virtues of a life in poetry. To paraphrase David Lehman, paraphrasing W.H. Auden, these books show that contemporary poetry not only survives, but thrives, in the valley of its saying. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman are the kinds of poets all young poets should aspire to emulate; both poets have placed the care of others and the interests of poetry above their own work. Both poets have taken E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End as the watchword for their careers: only connect. The impulse to celebrate and to understand underwrites the imperative to connect in the work of both Mazziotti Gillan and Lehman. The connectivity privileged by the lives and works of true poets such as these always and inevitably runs counter to the superficial forms of interconnection that bind the lives of so many contemporary Americans. Both Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman remind me that truth and beauty will never come either from social media and mainstream media or from the worlds of politics, business, and law; truth and beauty unfold face to face, and on the page, and both are infinite domains. Our work as lovers of poetry is to undo the damage of haste and dwell there—in the eye, in the ink—together.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

March 31, 2017

DD: In an interview you did with Poets & Writers Magazine, you discuss working on William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New & Selected Poemsduring your first years at Graywolf Press. This was the first Graywolf Press book that I ever purchased and remains one of my favorites. In reading through interviews you’ve done over the years, it strikes me that much of your thoughts as an editor parallel many of Stafford’s insights as a poet. Could you begin by discussing what Stafford’s work has meant to you as a reader and an editor?

JS: Thank you, and I’m glad to think of our experiences of the Graywolf poetry list as running side by side and starting with Stafford. I grew up in the middle of Kansas, not far from Hutchinson, Kansas, where Stafford grew up. My high school English teacher, the terrific Carole Ferguson, noted my interest in poetry, and mentioned Stafford and gave me a copy of “Traveling through the Dark.” It was the first time, really, I considered poetry as an ongoing art, and a poet as a living person, and someone who suddenly seemed proximate, when all else were wheatfields and churches. So Stafford’s very being changed everything. I share with him, very much still, a sense of landscape and severe austerity, and a shame at what our country perpetrates against so many, including our own citizens, as well as ourselves.

DD: Stafford also wrote: “We may be surrounded by a system of talking and writing that falsifies event after event, decision after decision, relation after relation. Tangled in this system, we perpetuate it. Like porpoises in a drift net, the harder we try, the more we are entangled…When a writer works he is like someone who sets himself in a closed room and then invents new exits.” These words, published in the early 1990s, seem even more apt in 2017. In the spirit of these words and in this era of “alternative facts,” what is the place of poetry?

JS: I agree with Stafford’s statement, that we are entangled and complicit in our entanglement, as long as we emphasize, as he does, that it is worth trying to escape, even in the most futile of times, perhaps like these, where our language is under assault, if not our sanity. We can’t always free ourselves, but we can sometimes loosen the nets and snares that are tightening around others. I think poetry is a force for recognizing the positions of other people who may be like us or who may be little like us, but for the duration of a poem, and the echoing after, we speak in and with another person’s voice. That’s a truth, or at least it can put us in relation to a truth, for which there is no “alternative fact.” I think the poetry that we need right now shows us, sometimes unbearably, the failures of power and of language and of political leadership and the consequences of our collective action and inaction. I am thinking very much of works that many readers are turning to, such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—works that position the reader in relation to confrontations of race, or examinations of the language of war, or the emptiness of false apology. The place of poetry is to show us the truth for what it is, and the lies for what they are. That isn’t new, per se, but neither are “alternative facts.” Kevin Young has an absolutely brilliant and ambitious nonfiction work coming this fall, titled Bunk, that has been many years in the making, and that so importantly demonstrates that American history has run parallel to the American hoax and to the American brand of racism, from Barnum to Trump. In publishing such books, and in many genres, Graywolf aims to combat fakery with literature of integrity.

JS: Many years ago, at Washington University, Carl Phillips implored me to read the poetry and critical works of Susan Stewart, and ever since, her clarity has been a touchstone and example of the lyric possibilities of both traditional and experimental poetry. Cinder is a perfect starting place for those who may not yet have been charmed by her particular ingenuity, and it’s a celebration of a remarkable ongoing career for those who have been reading her poetry and scholarship for years. I certainly admire the formal brilliance across these poems—the poem in the shape of an arrow, say, or the poem seemingly breaking down into an array of symbols and punctuation, or the poem that configures hell as a moving into and out of repeating lines, or the new poem in the form of gas-pump TV screens. But more than that, I admire the extraordinary sensibility behind these poems, one that is very concerned with the human capability for memory, individually and collectively, and concerned with our culture’s oppression of our human senses. I’m thinking, for example, of one of her masterpiece poems, “The Forest,” and the way the poem grapples with the question of how any of us will still be capable of experiencing a forest, in conception and in reality. So many of the poems, taken together, are reminders of art’s ability to record, encapsulate, and pass on our sensual experience. That’s an argument both of body and imagination, and of course, it’s an environmental and cultural argument, as well. Cinder opens with a terrific and generous group of new poems that alone is worth the book. I hope it’s an opportunity to celebrate a unique presence in contemporary poetry.

JS: All three of these poets offer very exciting first books this year, and they all point ahead to work that will matter for a long time.

WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier is a kaleidoscopic work, in large part a kind of searing rejoinder to the duplicity of government documentation, double talk, and pretend apology. The title sequence reconfigures the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which was never spoken aloud, nor were tribes invited to receive the apology, and which was then buried as a text inside larger legislation. So was this even an apology? WHEREAS attempts to answer that question. It’s an important and innovative book, and one that has been a long time in its making.

Afterland by Mai Der Vang is a historic publication, the first major award-winner by a Hmong American poet, and we’re really proud to be publishing it at Graywolf as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Carolyn Forché selected the book for its really moving recounting of the Hmong exodus from Laos during the fallout of the Vietnam War, and the resilience and survival of the Hmong culture in exile here in the United States. The imagery of these poems is so unique—otherworldly and haunting in regard to “afterland” as the country refugees flee to and as the spirit world of the afterlife.

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez is a bold combination of personal poems about growing up the daughter of undocumented Mexican parents and almost journalistic poems about sex workers, narco traffickers, and immigrant laborers. The subjects here are important ones, and Sánchez makes them feel vivid and very close, while also turning a discerning eye on the history of both sides of the border (and beyond), as well as on herself, sometimes with a deadpan and self-effacing wit. This is a really audacious book, and an important one.

It’s a hugely exciting time for poetry with so many amazing first books!

DD: In a recent book review written for the New York Times, David Orr writes of the first book:

"If you’re an author who specializes in, say, writing about science for general readers, then your first book will be regarded by most people as . . .the book you wrote first. That it was your inaugural effort will have no special significance; your work will be judged the way books are typically judged: as interesting or dull. But if your goal is to write about the imaginary lives of imaginary people or — particularly — to write poems, then your first book may be another matter entirely. Because now it’s not merely the book of yours that happened to have the earliest publication date. Now it is the start of your career."

Could you discuss your thoughts on the essential specialness of the debut collection in poetry? What have you learned about debut collections by reading and editing so many of them?

JS: Orr is right, I think, in that we seem to think of a poet’s development as something with a beginning, an arc, and an ending, and it’s often the work of scholars and critics to make a lot out of what it means for a poet to have a career. In fact, Craig Morgan Teicher is working on a book to be published by Graywolf about poetic development, titled We Begin in Gladness, which will look at various paths and directions—many of them not easy nor at all straightforward—as examples useful to readers and to poets getting started and wondering what a “career” even looks like. What does it mean for a poet to have a life in the art?

It’s true that a poet only gets one first book, and while more first books of poetry are published than ever before, many of them through first-book prizes and contests, there is the pressure for a first book to make a statement. I think poets feel a pressure, understandably, to come out with a book quickly and to have that book get attention, and that’s an impatience imposed by academic professional expectation if not by the ambitions of poets themselves, in many cases. It means publishers like Graywolf see a whole lot of first book manuscripts, and first-book contests like the Walt Whitman Award are flooded with thousands of submissions. It also means that way too many poets get overlooked at the stages of the first book, and perhaps even more so, the second book. That’s a reason why Graywolf feels it so important to collaborate on the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, for a first book by an American poet over the age of forty, and partner on the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for an African American poet’s first book, including most recently Donika Kelly’s amazing debut, Bestiary, which is one of the first books Orr is reviewing in the New York Times piece you quote from.

While I think every first book (or otherwise) is hopefully different and distinct, and so I hesitate to try to offer broad commentary about them, but in order to answer your question, I would say that many first books want to be acceptable, they want to win the contest, and they want to be liked. But fewer first books want to challenge, they want to risk, they want to unsettle, and they care less that they are liked and more that they are read and even resisted.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

JS: Every time a writer considers editorial suggestions and on certain things the writer pushes back, I feel encouraged that the writer is assured in their vision and ready to be published. It means perhaps seeming foolish or seeming just plain wrong or off base, but it also means I feel I have done my job in approaching the line that the writer has deliberated upon and decided is the defining line of what they sound like. That is the invisible work in the intimate space between writer and editor. It’s very encouraging to me as an editor.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

JS: The incredible groundswell of young poets right now, among them some individually brilliant talents, but more importantly, together creating a sense of collective greatness by way of national community defined by artistry and activism. That is encouraging as a development not just in contemporary poetry but in our world.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JS: American poetry needs serious, astute, challenging, and regular poetry critics and reviewers who are people of color, and who are women, and who are given an ongoing byline in the visible print and online publications that middle-aged or older white men are regularly holding and have been holding for a very long time. Solmaz Sharif very rightly mentioned recently that we need a great, new criticism to run alongside the great, new poetry of our time.

DD: If you could only read and remember one poem for the rest of your life, what poem would it be and why?

JS: You’re describing a world I don’t want to live in. We exist for multiplicity not just for singularity, and the single poem can only be great because it exists in a world with other poems in it. And if I knew I had found the one poem to be read and remembered for the rest of my life, and could name it for you, I think I could no longer do my job as an editor, nor could I continue to read poetry. Luckily, it seems, I haven’t found that poem yet, and I’m happy to be left in this fallen world where I am still searching for it among the many life-changing imperfect ones.

DD: What prose, music, and other art have most influenced you as a poetry reader and editor?

DD: Could you tell us a bit about some of the other Graywolf Press titles out later this year?

JS: In 2017 poetry, in addition to the titles mentioned above by Stewart, Long Soldier, Vang, and Sánchez, Graywolf is publishing:

Danez Smith’s big, bold second book, Don’t Call Us Dead, a really exciting and moving collection about race, police violence, illness, and the body in crisis;

Stephen Burt’s new collection, Advice from the Lights, which contains poems of memory and nostalgia, and also on gender identity, especially in the Stephanie poems throughout the book;

Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing is a sequence of prose poems in Bang’s unique signature language about the Bauhaus School in Germany, its artists and art (from which the title comes), and in particular the life of Lucia Moholy, who struggled so much of her life to be recognized for her photographs documenting the school, before the Nazis closed it in 1933;

Fred Marchant’s best book to date, titled Said Not Said, which is a book about moral and ethical questions, what gets spoken and what goes unspoken, and it includes a really wrenching sequence of poems about his sister’s long suffering from mental illness;

we are expanding and reissuing a truly essential book, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, in Robert Bly’s seminal translations, which Graywolf first published in 2001, but we’re now glad to offer for the first time all of Bly’s known translations of Tranströmer’s luminous poems;

and we are publishing in November a really fascinating book, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, which will present original poems with multiple English translations, followed by a brief essay about the challenges of translating that work, all in a wide trim size to allow readers to see the poems and translations side by side by side.

Each year, Graywolf features online previews of all of our books in a given genre across the year, and for a better rundown on this year’s offerings, you can find the poetry preview here.

DD: I’d like to end the interview with my favorite poem from a Graywolf Press book, Christopher Gilbert’s “Listening to Monk’s Misterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair” from Turning into Dwelling. Could you introduce this poem (and this amazing book)?

JS: Every interview should end with this poem and with celebration of Christopher Gilbert. It’s a poem from Gilbert’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, Across the Mutual Landscape, which was selected by Michael S. Harper and published by Graywolf in 1984. It was Gilbert’s only published collection in his lifetime, but it has long been a kind of touchstone first book—in certain circles a cult classic—for its vision and music, as in this poem. Gilbert sees the syncopations and patterns of Thelonious Monk’s Mysterioso, which walks forward and backward in intervals, as akin to the patterns of braiding. But more than that, it’s the movement of offering and taking back, being called into a space that you might not normally be invited into, like braiding your sisters’ hair. There’s no music like Gilbert’s, part homage to jazz, sure, but the music of a mind making sense of itself and calling itself to be. Like music, it’s a poem whose language exists seemingly in and out of time, a participation with mutuality, and one that never arrives or tries to arrive at completion.

After Gilbert’s death in 2007, through Ed Pavlic and Terrance Hayes, we found that Gilbert had been working for a long time on a second collection, called Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation, which had been entrusted and edited by Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, and in 2015, we were able to publish Across the Mutual Landscape and Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation together in one book, titled Turning into Dwelling, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes. It’s landmark work, and it deserves as many readers as it can get, and it certainly deserves—thank you, Dante—the last word.

Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair

What it’s all about is being just beyond a man’s grasp, which is a kind of consciousness you can own, to get to be at a moment’s center and let it keep on happening knowing you don’t own it—

which is moving yourself close to, being particular to that place. Like my two sisters taking turns braiding each others’ hair— hair growing against their weaving, they formed a flow their hurt and grace could mean as each took turns pulling the comb through the other’s knots and their little Vaseline.

A knowing which makes the world a continuity. As in your core something calls to you at a distance which does not matter. As in the world you will see yourself listening to follow like water following its wave to shore.

To arrive in your life you must embrace this letting, letting which is a match for the stream through flowering field and the tall trees wandered into and the river wearing beads just ahead which you go into further on because you can.

This going so is something else—the way it flows into always something deeper and over your head, a kid with “why” questions. Your answer is a moment struggling to be more than itself, your straining for air to have the chance to breathe it free. It’s alive you’ve come to,

this coming into newness, this dis- continuous mind in you looking up, finding an otherness which trusts what you’ll become— for me, my sisters once offering, “You want to learn to braid my hair.” If we are blessed in this world it is in feeling this—

i.e., there are circumstances and you are asked to be their member. Not owning but owning in— a participation, like Monk’s implied words reaching for their sentence: “If you can get to it. . . .”

At a hefty 740 pages, the new anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance symbolically and actually enacts the oppositional imperatives embedded in its title. 50% of the proceeds from the volume are being donated to Planned Parenthood. The assembling of the anthology itself, spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, represents a model for activism and mobility in a time of political emergency. Boughn and Johnson brought together eighteen other editors from diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds to solicit and to curate the work of more than 350 poets in roughly two months. As Boughn and Johnson note in their incisive introduction, “Poetry and Resistance,” the book “is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated “creative writing.” It is first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part and parcel of a sovereign people’s challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22nd—and they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation.” In addition to enumerating succinctly the premises underwriting Resist Much, Boughn and Johnson’s introduction trenchantly explores the limits and potentials of poetry as resistance. The anthology is worth purchasing for the introduction alone, which sounds a hopeful note for the many thousands of practicing writers in the United States today who will register dissent “in the embattled commons, and not just in journals, personal collections, or anthologies like this one.”

The anthology begins and ends with poems registering dissent beyond the narrow scope of the 45th President’s election and inauguration. Lorenzo Thomas’s poem, “Inauguration” initiates the anthology, by recalling the Reagan and Kennedy administrations, and by summoning the ghost of Robert Frost in order to evoke a counternarrative to the Manifest Destiny both lauded and complicated in Frost’s work. In “Inauguration,” Thomas rewrites the famous first line of Frost’s “The Gift Outright”; Frost’s “The land was ours before we were the land’s” becomes Thomas’s “The land was there before us / Was the land.” Thomas’s version radically re-envisions historical notions of ownership, privilege, and class, while halving, enjambing, and subverting Frostian blank verse on the syntactical level. By beginning the anthology with this revolutionary inversion of a poem Frost claimed as a commentary on the Revolutionary War, Boughn, Johnson, and company, inaugurate Resist Much as an anthology concerned with troubling superficial ways of seeing and articulating; Lorenzo Thomas’s poem moves its readers backward and forward in time, opening a dialogue between literary tradition and the mechanisms of empire. Likewise opening these dialogues, the anthology ends with Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!,” a poem of grim forebodings and astringent ironies, the bleak flipside of the democratic vistas Whitman celebrated throughout Leaves of Grass.

Reading “Respondez!” at the end of this anthology further affirms, as if any affirmation were needed, the towering stature of Whitman as poet of these United States. Whitman wrote “Respondez!,” at the same time as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but ultimately left it out of later editions of Leaves of Grass, such as the 1891-92 version. Despite Whitman’s exclusion of the poem, it is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment contained within Resist Much of the failures in contemporary American politics and culture. As Boughn and Johnson remark in their introduction “Respondez!” was Whitman’s: “sharply ironic demand that U.S. America respond to the betrayal of its democratic promise, its abandonment of equality for oligarchy, of fraternity for institutionalized racism and sexism, of spiritual generosity for greed and money grubbing, and of liberation of Eros for a violent, Calvinist repression of human energies.” Whitman’s impassioned plea reads as ominously timely in an era of so-called “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Whitman writes:

Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions! Let the old propositions be postponed! Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results! Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery! Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?) Let trillions of men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!

Although murderers, thieves, bigots, and fools have always helmed the ship of state, perhaps at no time in American history have meanings been so freely criminal. Perhaps at no time has our destination been so unclear. Perhaps at no time have so many American men and women been mocked in body and mind, have felt so acutely the Dickinsonian “zero at the bone” when contemplating the fate of their nation and the face of their president. At no time in recent memory has the theory of America announced itself so stridently and so overtly as management, caste, and comparison.

The writing anthologized between Lorenzo Thomas’s “Inauguration” and Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!” opposes any theory of America grounded in racism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and an ever-shifting panoply of disparate hates and fears. The poems in this volume are written in what Evie Shockley calls “the heartbreak edge of midnight.” These are songs sung by a fugal choir to the northernmost stars, the wayward child, the coercive lover, the dependent child, the reluctant mother, the unfaithful lover, the elusive mother, the waking nightmare, the “dear, dear we.” Resist Much includes work from as aesthetically different poets as Ron Silliman, Linh Dinh, Rodrigo Toscano, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jason Schneiderman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Alicia Ostriker, Michelle Peñaloza, Craig Santos Perez, R.A. Villanueva, Fady Joudah, and Brenda Hillman, to name a few. The editors listed above also contribute poems. The contributions come from emerging and established poets of varied camps and approaches to poetry. The unity and inclusiveness practiced in this anthology offers a pointed critique of the fractious polarization overwhelming American political discourse. This inclusiveness offers a heartening example for other anthologists, editors, and publishers to overcome aesthetic orthodoxies and to embrace the kaleidoscopic possibilities of what constitutes a poem.

Eileen Myles and Denise Duhamel’s anthologized poems provide a good example of how two accomplished and wildly distinctive poets might address the same subject through widely different means. Myles poem, “Creep,” reads:

ugly nightmare eating too much dunking your head in water over and over again. Feel bad for your kid all of them but most of all us bad nights when I was young and drinking pred atory men with swollen heads would buy me drinks and want to fuck me again & again because I was nothing to them and he is our president now.

Myles deftly puts into conversation the misogyny displayed by “our president” with the predatory violence that contextualizes the everyday experiences of American women. Trauma and rage dovetail in this poem and counterclaim us. Denise Duhamel similarly explores the dovetailing of rage and trauma in American misogyny. Her poem, which cleverly parodies Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” begins with a quote dated October 9, 2016, from the then-candidate, casually dismissing comments that clearly celebrate objectifying and violating women: “It’s just words, folks. It is just words.” Duhamel begins her poem:

‘Twas nasty, and the slithy bimbos Did gyre and whine in the pageant: All piggy were the gold diggers, And the moms who breastfed in public.

“Beware the pussy, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware those plastic surgery tits, and shun Any frump who won’t put out!”

Carroll’s nonsense verse provides an apt point of departure for satirizing a politician whose entire worldview depends upon the simultaneous denial and attenuation of the power of language. Duhamel, like Myles, foregrounds her poem in the present, but uses the present to explore how misogyny works in a wider historical and social sense.

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance offers a wide array of poems, addressing issues from misogyny to climate change, ranging from the collapse of the fourth estate to police violence, exploring the fascistic tributaries of American culture that have always been running beside us, but which have pooled themselves in the current administration. The poets anthologized here bear witness against injustice past, present, and future. In his excellent recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, historian Timothy Snyder urges: “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read Books.” Resist Much affords many examples of reinventing and repurposing language in order to confront tyranny and fascism. Editing this book was one act of resistance, buying this book is another, reading it a third. This anthology does not merely symbolize the widespread resistance to the current administration among poets and writers. Resist Much signifies the strength of a literate and politically conscious America, which will not be duped by the mountebank tactics and the empty rhetoric of politicians. As Whitman would affirm, it is up to writers, governments, and households alike, to brace themselves against “the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust.” Buy this book today, read it, and spread the word. Resist.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

March 04, 2017

In his essay, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” Lewis Hyde notes: “as a person becomes alcoholic he turns more and more into the drug and its demands. He is like a fossil leaf that mimics the living but is really stone.” Kaveh Akbar’s debut chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, initiates a reverse fossilization that catalogs the hungers, atomizes the absences, and amplifies the dailiness of 21st century American life. Akbar’s fierce unfettered intelligence roams from the sublunary to the interstellar. One moment, Akbar’s poems view the world from the perspective of sand watching silt dance in the Nile River. The next moment, Akbar’s poems look on, from the other side of the stars, past the astronaut dangling from the umbilicus of the space shuttle, to the earth itself “wilding around us” in “a severe sort of miraculousness.” Akbar knows the language of riptide and rogue comet; in these poems, “eternity looms / in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap.” The self in Akbar’s poems is a shifting palimpsest of insatiable desires, mystic visions, exilic energies, and adhesive love. As Akbar puts it in “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game”: “I have always been a tangle of tongue and pretty / want.”

Akbar’s “tangle of tongue and pretty want” is Whitmanesque in its scope, evoking the visionary tradition of English language poetry from Christopher Smart and Thomas Traherne through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Allen Ginsberg to present, and reformulating that tradition within the framework of an Islamic cultural background with its own distinct visionary poetic tradition, ranging from Rabia Basri and Fariduddin Attar, through Jalaluddin Rumi, to Mian Muhammad Baksh. In “An Apology,” for example, Akbar writes:

As a boy I tore out the one-hundred-and-nine pages about Hell in my first Qur’an. Bountiful bloomscattering Lord, I could feel you behind my eyes and under my tongue, shocking me nightly like an old battery.

The transgressive act of tearing pages from the Qur’an recalls Fariduddin Attar’s poem “I Have Broken My Vows,” in which the speaker enjoins: “Throw me out of the mosque, / As I went there drunk last night.” In fact, Akbar’s poetry ingeniously inverts the trope of drunkenness found in Islamic mystical poetry. In Portrait of the Alcoholic, sobriety, not inebriation, becomes a metaphor for the intoxicating nature of communion with the divine. The divine, in these poems, can be found equally in the ordinary housefly and in the dilated pupils of a beloved. In “Eager,” Akbar affirms: “I like the life/ I have now free as an unhinged jaw but still I visit my corpse.” Here, as everywhere else in his poetry, Kaveh Akbar chooses astonishment instead of despair, joy instead of mere survival, gratitude for the alchemical body, and its ancient hungers, become a mound of jewels. Portrait of the Alcoholic must surely presage a bountiful, radiant, bloomscattering body of work to come.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Jes’ Grew, for those who don’t know, is the epidemic at the center of Ishmael Reed’s hilarious prophetic noir, Mumbo Jumbo. It’s hard to put your finger on Jes’ Grew because it doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s related to Emerson’s whim but it’s got more rhythm which I like to think Emerson would have enjoyed. If it’s dance – and it is dance – it’s also a freedom of mind that can look like dance. Or sound like it. It’s a “psychic epidemic.”

Things Jes’ Grew when all of a sudden you start moving and not only can’t you stop, you don’t want to stop. Inspiration is a sad Atonist imitation of Jes’ Grew. Jes’ Grew takes the top off. Jes’ Grew is a mortal threat to civilization and its discontents – as Ishmael Reed said, it belongs under some ancient Demonic Theory of Disease. Right now we can see Jes’ Grew starting to spread again, infecting millions with its laughter and its anger and its passion and its movement. Swaying its hips and marching down the middle of the street. The mass movement is moving and Jes’ Grew is its feverish disease, its Nkulu Kulu of the Zulu, a locomotive with red green and black python entwined in its face, Johnny Canoeing up the tracks.

Dispatches Jes’ Grew in a crucible of talk and mind and laughter and anger where all good things grow. Boom. Then there it was, dancing. Kent saw that and took it up several notches. We started off slow and picked up steam one day at a time and Jes’ Grew.

KJ: Though Mike and I are quite aware that posting on the Dispatches site has been considerably slowed the past number of weeks… We’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the work on the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, soon to be released by Dispatches Editions. 350+ poets and 740 pages. (Actually, Tennessee Reed, Ishmael’s daughter, is in it, so there’s that chance growth to Mike’s reference, I suppose.) But we’ll get back to our usual cranky senior-citizen selves. Dispatches from the Poetry Wars will keep advancing by projective force of institutional critique, one unsuspected accretion leading instanter onto another, as someone else more or less once memorably put it… Of course, most of what we do is totally by the seat of our pants, as you might imagine. Dancing sitting down, etc. It is how we’ve done it, how we like it, and how we’ll keep rolling.

And strange that we’ve been doing it only for nine months, that it’s developed this much and attracted such a readership in this initial gestation, our audience consistently growing. One gratifying thing has been getting lots of communications from folks (some of them not eager to publicly share the confidences!), from poets of different aesthetic backgrounds and generations, telling us how much they dig Dispatches’ outlier charge, its willingness to be impolite in this deeply cautious poetic field, where people walk around on quiet toes most of the time, afraid for their “careers.” In any case, it’s become evident many readers appreciate that we confront and satirize and critique, with no special allowances for anyone, ourselves not excepted. Or is that “ourselves included,” I grew up in Uruguay with Spanish double negatives and I get confused. On the other hand, it’s been gratifying, and confirming, too, to not get any communication from some folks or institutions! Like the Poetry Foundation, which we’ve gone after a tad, it’s true, and which has clearly determined to pretend we don’t exist. Gratifying, I mean, in the sense of being a bit entertaining, really. Well, “Onward, Subcultural soldiers,” as the old-time hymn goes!

DD: In your first dispatch, you write: “Poetry is and always will be an unruly opening of profound modes of oppositional thought, a constant reset of “knowledge” and its categories, a site of revelation for unprecedented form and exorbitant meaning.” How do you see these “modes of oppositional thought” operating in this era of “alternative facts” and what you’ve called a “reality TV ontology”?

MB: Modes of oppositional thought operate within, and in fact are part of the crucial in-formation of, temporary autonomous zones that proliferate a-centrally to greater or lesser degrees in relation to the Given. They are openings, the play of emergence where you pick up news of that elsewhere that is here, always here and in this moment that Octavio Paz named otherness. Alternative facts and Reality TV ontology are conditions that only signify within the discourses determined by modernity. And as Charles Olson tried to tell people, we are already way past that.

No wonder the categories are breaking down. No wonder truth is evaporating in the desperate struggle to adjust to our groundlessness. It’s modernity’s truth without meaning, truth as an accurate measure of only the material extension of the cosmos, truth as fact whose techne creates the massive commodification machine that feeds the endless markets that arise to create sites where brief, fleeting experiences that resemble what used to be called meaning occur at endless points of purchase. What a deal. And even poetry, which I used to consider the anti-commodity, the death of commodification, has been turned into a token to advance careers, establish hoards of cultural capital, and found academic empires.

Temporary autonomous zones celebrate groundlessness as opportunity for the imagination to go on a tear. They don’t require bourgeois truth because modes of oppositional thought are creative, not reactive. We are the inheritors of the inevitable disintegration of a 500-year-old system riddled with violent, irresolvable contradictions that are coming to head. Temporary autonomous zones are forays into what John Clarke called “world completion,” looking out, not back, seizing the opportunity to articulate new groundings that refuse to become grounded.

KJ: That is a wonderful passage in our first, opening Dispatch, isn’t it? A kind of encapsulated Poetics. I wish I’d written it. But Mike usually comes up with the best lines. Not that I don’t get lucky and trip across a few myself. Which Mike then revises for me. No just kidding. The two of us actually have a fully fraternal and non-competitive collaboration. Quite amazing, really, that we’ve gone on this long, at this level of intensity, with no major blowups. Not exactly the most common thing in poetry circles.

I have just one comment here, about Mike’s use of the term “alternative fact.” It’s not really a disagreement with what Mike says, so much as an expansion of the term into other criteria: Poetry is its own alternative fact, the constructive ethical flip side to the manipulative “alternative facts” of ideological dissimulation and propaganda. To poach from Picasso (or was that Pessoa?) we aim to lie our asses off in name of the truth. And to poach from Eileen Myles’s cool blurb on the back of the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, we will drown their banal, manipulative lies with the clear water of our truth-telling ones. (Mike, don’t blow up on me for first time for disagreeing with you here!)

DD: Kent, you and Michael have spent your artistic lives challenging orthodoxies and status quos inside and outside the poetry world. How, if at all, has this mission changed post-election?

KJ: Yes, I suppose that is true, how we’ve spent our artistic lives. It’s one reason we are outsider pariahs with overdue AARP cards. Not to mention that it’s why we never get invited to any poetry soirees on either of the three coasts (I’m including the Great Lakes, there, where I live). Or in the Dakotas or Saskatchewan, for that matter. So: Know what you are getting into, thou hordes of young poets at the AWP, now yearning to emulate our gadfly proclivities…

Seriously, I know what you’re getting at, Dante: That in the introduction to the anthology, Mike and I forcefully call for a united front of poets, across the tendencies and factions. And this is something the big book represents and enacts, to be sure, as its contents reflect all manner of “aesthetic” allegiances, from the colloquial and prosaic to the experimental and paratactic. Calling for such a united front would seem to provisionally put “poetry war” critique on hold, right? So, you ask a good question.

But I don’t think the matter has “changed post-election,” really, at least not in that manner. I myself go way back with this united-front position, and far back beyond my days as a publishing poet, in fact, to the mid-1970s, when I first become active in socialist politics. Extending those learned principles, I wrote an essay that was pretty widely circulated at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, titled “Bernstein’s ‘Enough!’” wherein I called for provisional poetic unity via the temporary collective vehicle of the Poets against the War project, and somewhat acidly berated the infantile sectarianism shown at the time by Language Poetry figures like Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. More recently, I published an essay in Lana Turner, titled “No Avant-Garde,” where I called for the thinking-through of a broad cultural front, wherein writers and artists would deprioritizetheir aesthetic differences (but without giving them up!) vis-a-vis the tasks of principled unity around issues of progressive cause and action. Not that there aren’t others out there who might disagree with my views, and I am eager to invite them into exchange, if so! But poets, especially “Left” ones, generally don’t seem to like to debate too much in public, alas.

Of course, there is nothing new about such proposals. Such principled united-front strategy is at the heart of Left history and policy—it’s even the core assumption of the internal operations of bolshevist parties, before the Stalinist era! Not to mention social-democratic ones. What I’m saying is not that aesthetic differences be ignored or that critique be suspended. To the contrary, such critique must continue and be understood as part of the very process of cultural solidarity construction. What must happen, though, is that poets rise above their narrow poetic allegiances and predispositions of coterie to see that these don’t have to trump (sorry) the greater responsibility of collaboration and solidarity in the current conjuncture. Because that, most unfortunately for poetry’s politics, in and out, is what has happened: though there are some crossovers, poets of different aesthetics largely don’t talk to each other. Poets of the Geraldine Dodge Festival mainstream pretty much ignore and dismiss poets of the Avant wing of things. Avant poets think they’re so far ahead of slam poets in NYC or Chicago that they don’t need to pay them heed, for the slam folks are clueless about their more sophisticated vanguard understandings, and so forth. This is all sophomoric, cliquish bullshit and has to cease. There are many avenues and ways of collaboration between the poetic “tendencies” that haven’t even begun to be explored, and it will be in that comradeship, volatile to be sure, that the richest and most productive aesthetic debates will evolve. And may those debates be honest and fierce, as they should be. But the first step is to give up on this crap of “screw your poetry, ours is more of the common language and working class,” or “ours is more advanced, this is the analytic form we need, not your sorry workshop stuff” etc. We need to bring it all together, now, I would say, and see what happens. No one is above anyone else because no one really knows what the answer is. You know what I mean?

MB: Nothing has changed. Nothing. It is the same terrorist state that has operated in the US since Winthrop and the General Court expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Sometimes it dresses up better, and sometimes it likes people to think it is “nice.” But it goes on shooting unarmed black men like Charles Kinsey, lying on his back with his hands in the air yelling “Don’t shoot.” (We have a precise found poem about this at Dispatches.) It goes on dragging Sandra Bland out of her car and lynching her in her cell for being an uppity black woman. Bang. The Poetry Wars are important and ongoing, even as we join multiple antagonists from that war to resist the current regime, because poetry is the only news worth knowing, and without waging a struggle for that, the careerists will succeed in locking it all up in the Great Philadelphia Poetry Detention Center (aka Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse and Media Center), where it will be alphabetized, categorized, and filed away for easy consumption in podcasts and use in marketing programs to increase the cultural capital of the Poetry Capitalists. Fuck that.

DD: You and Michael have written an amazing introduction to the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, in which you discuss the origin and intent of the project. Could you restate for our readers how this anthology came about and how it seeks to inaugurate a resistance to the Trump administration and its policies?

KJ: Thank you for saying that about the essay, Dante. Mike wrote to me on the day after the election, no doubt hungover, like I was, and he said, “Maybe it’s time for an anthology.” Because my head was stuffed with gauze alcohol swabs and I wasn’t thinking straight, I immediately wrote back to him, “OK, sure, let’s do it!” Then I can’t remember exactly what happened, it’s sort of a blur. Mike yelled at me a few times and I yelled at him, then we made up, or maybe we did not; we sometimes like doing yelling at each other.

Our masterstroke was pulling in a team of twenty incredible and dedicated poet-editors, who then went to the wall to bring people to the book. You can see their names on the cover. We totally decentralized the book’s production, out of emergency necessity, and (excepting the many unsolicited submissions we received to the Dispatches site, which Mike and I handled) the many editors had full autonomy over their solicitations and selections. Full mutual trust, risky but necessary. Then we gathered all this stuff, after thousands of emails back and forth between everyone, and went through a million more logistical nightmarish details, and Mike heroically handled all the formatting and technical labors, because I don’t even know how to create a PDF, and we put it all together, handling a second and fourth round of nightmarish logistical details, and then we wrote the intro and sent it all off for final design to the talented Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, one of our co-editors, and here we are, after being at 770 pages, and then having to edit the formatting down to 740 at the last second, because the spine couldn’t handle the thickness otherwise. This all happened in less than ten weeks. Right now, as we write, Valentine’s Day, the pornographic complicity (in more ways than one) of the Trump clique with the Russian mafia is coming clearer and clearer. Love to you, from tens of thousands of poets in the world, neo-Fascist johns.

MB: It Jes’ Grew.

DD: Despite the dire political situation confronting the United States at this moment, your introduction strikes a hopeful note for “collective measures of performance and action that move beyond the printed page.” Could you talk about “the new dimensions of activist vision” that may energize poetry in the coming years?

MB: Poetry is resistance by its very nature. It exposes the structures of containment that bind us mentally and spiritually, and materializes acts of freedom that break through that containment. Some people, like William Blake, realized that and made their writing into an ongoing revelation of our condition, a weapon for liberation, an act of resistance that still propels us further, beyond those mental chains. Others just get an MFA or an advanced degree in Poetics and carry on with their poetry careers. With the rise of a mass movement, and I do think that is what we are seeing in relation to the naked aggression of Trump’s regime against decency, compassion, care, even the idea of “democracy” itself, (poetry) business as usual is over. Poetry that brings the news will become more and more a part of people’s daily lives.

KJ: What Mike says. And we should be especially keen right now to the experiences of poetic/cultural activist movements in other places and times, study them for lessons we might apply: experiences where poets have reimagined the very meaning of “poetry” and thus given it unsuspected powers of influence and inspiration within the broader dialectic of struggle. We mention a few of them in the introduction, like the example of the CADA group and its allies during the Pinochet period, in Chile. American poets should look at the cultural guerrilla tactics of vanguard groups like CADA and others and seek to apply them to current Trumpian conditions. The stage of ideological, transgressive struggle has been set by the neo-fascist theater producers themselves. It’s time to occupy that stage with epic cultural actions and anti-actions, moving the meaning of radical performance into four and more dimensions, trashing all the B-movie scripts they had dreamt of directing.

DD: Reading through the manuscript of the anthology, Pierre Joris’s piece, “A little contribution to a how-to of resistance” caught my eye. The piece ends:

Vision-in-resistance/ resistance-in-vision as essential modes of action. (Revolution we’ve learned goes in circles, eats its own, creates bureaucra- cies.) Bertolt Brecht said: What times are these when / To talk about trees is nearly a crime, / Because it avoids speaking of all that’s evil! Paul Celan answered: What times are these / when A conversation / is nearly a crime, / because it includes so much / that’s already been said. I add: What times are these when a US President can define “real freedom” as the ability “for a person or nation to make a living, to sell or buy.”

It seems to me that the dialogue enacted in these lines is emblematic of the anthology’s project as a whole. Could you riff off of Joris (and Celan, and Brecht) and discuss this dialogue?

MB: Well, the key is Pierre’s opening equation: vision-in-resistance / resistance-in-vision. We need to keep in mind that the struggle we are engaged in is not simply “political” in so far as that is defined as a negotiation/struggle for power in a civic arena. The power at stake is the power to define a world as we emerge from the wreckage of the last Sampo. Poetry is uniquely placed to respond to that necessity because of its freedom in language, its creative potential, its necessary but indeterminate meaning which is entangled with vision. Not all poetry does that. A lot of it is all about buying in. Pierre’s injunction is to keep the vision active and non-central because without that, the same old tyrannies, tyrannies of meaning and power which are like wave and particle in quantum mechanics, will be reborn with new names. What times are these is a really good question to keep in mind not as some kind of closure, but as an opening between or beyond the particular horrors of our moment.

KJ: If I could offer this thought, triggered by your reference to Brecht: One genre-avenue for poets in the coming period that could be more explored, at least in regards to insurgent poetic engagement, is Poet’s Theater. What unsuspected estrangement-effects might happen when poetry and theater interface? More theater by poets! Not the largely nihilistic, hollow kind that we have had since the late-Language poetry phase up through Flarf, but a vibrantly radical and committed new form of poetic staging, one that learns (albeit with critique!) from Brecht, Erwin Piscator, John Arden, and Margaretta D'Arcy, say. Not that I’m all that in-the-know about theater; I’m certainly not. But there’s a space of action for poets here, no question.

DD: Resist Much / Obey Little has eighteen editors. I was wondering if a few of the editors could give me a comment on their involvement in this project and the importance of this anthology right now.

Nita Noveno: This anthology is urgent literature for our democracy. Working on the editorial team with Mike, Kent, and the others for the past few months (all online) was a pleasure. They were responsive, flexible, and encouraging in what was a challenging process. I especially appreciated their openness and energy in the endeavor. It was all worth it for a formidable and inspiring book.

Philip Metres: I was happy to be a contributing editor, to solicit poems from other poets, as part of a wider chorus of resistance to the election of Donald Trump. The naysayers will say that this is not enough. Of course it isn't enough. Poems themselves can never replace the prose of political engagement (voting, calling and writing congress people, canvassing, writing letters to the editor, protesting, boycotting, divesting, and the rest) but poetry can be part of our vocal commitment to democratic life, to the quest for human liberation, social justice, and planetary health. In the end, I'm less interested in the rhetoric of resistance than I am in the possibilities of the revisionary imagination to create the beloved community.

Kass Fleisher: I wasn’t part of the Outrage Action (I call it) after the election—I had been working the election in three states—not the presidential, but for three senate races, in PA, IL, and CO. But when you’re phonebanking, you hear some weird shit (people say the damnedest things into their telephones…) so I knew this was going to go down hard. I was also working citizen journalism on Facebook and getting killed by the right *and* the left. And I’ve been a feminist activist since 1982 and had been telling anyone who would listen to me, No way does this country elect a woman in a landslide. (Usually I spared people the lecture on nativism.) So when people started shrieking from any platform they could find on November 9, I was not among them. I had predicted 3 recounts, and I was bummed that we weren’t getting the recounts I wanted. lol. (Just so you know how dumb I am: I predicted them in PA, NC, and someplace I now forget—I can check my records but I doubt anyone gives a damn. I had been saying, “Pennsylvania is the new Florida.” But NC was a shock to me. Did not see that coming. In my defense, neither did James Carville. (Ha.)

One of my bubbles is the poetry bubble, and the thing folks in that universe were shrieking in The Great Aftermath (:>) was, We have to make poetry, we have to make poems, we poets have to work through poetry, let’s make some poems, who can publish some poems. To be honest, my first thought was, Stop voting for the Green Party when you’re running against an idiot; and my second thought was, What can poetry achieve in this situation.

It wasn’t a question because, really, I thought—nothing.

But I’ll tell you what, and I speak now as an anthologist and a micro-press publisher, I really liked what Kent and Mike came up with. (And other people may have been involved; it was Kent who approached me.) It wasn’t a howl in the wilderness—they got very well organized very fast. I’m in awe of how fast, and I love the model of finding X number of editors and giving us the freedom to solicit and edit people/works of our choosing. That was genius, and they also cared nothing for aesthetic schools or “what kind of poetry”—we were told “relevant.”

Immediately I began to think of this as an avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. It was clear that the recently revived Inaugural Poet thing was not going to happen, and if poetry can achieve something in our current situation, it would have to be in an avalanche.

And that’s what we have here—a fucking avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. I loved getting to work with the people who answered my own call, and I loved working on their pieces, which were all over the place in terms of structure and topic and form—and so what I see now that the damn thing is together, is that this avalanche of poems has a function. I’m scheduling a launch for it in my remote area for a couple of reasons: one is that folks of all bubbles still need a place to gather and process and plan to activate in this environment; and because the avalanche is so impressive that they will gain an appreciation for poetry of wildly varying “types.”

The way this thing was put together was *perfect*; the outcome is reflective of that initial blast of organization. I wish I’d been in the room for that—I probably would’ve said, You people should’ve worked a polling place. I’m that kind of asshole, lol. Folks in this particular bubble, and I’m one of them—we tend to be quite isolated—we work alone—we don’t always get out much—my own writing pals are scattered to the winds—so, it’s great that they found this way to bring us together, and with this magnificent result.

Can’t say enough about what they achieved here. I’m grateful.

Andrew Levy:Resist Much / Obey Little is BIG, with the voices of 350 contributors. When Kent and Mike asked for my participation as a contributing editor on the anthology, I didn’t hesitate. We could have easily, with a little more time (and money), attracted 3500 poets with valuable things to say at this moment in our country’s history. I’m teaching a literature course at CUNY this spring. The following statement from Martin Luther King, Jr. is the epigraph to the course syllabus: “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists…The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority… Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (From Strength to Love)

Mindful of partisans such as Steve Bannon encouraging empire and its requisite illusions of apocalypse, whose armies of ruin offer paratory glances of an abandoned tomorrow, on the planet Earth the creatively maladjusted poets in Resist Much / Obey Little speak truth to power, thereby holding warring factions of American unreason accountable. How do mechanisms of social abandonment, in the imaginary hatred of the undevelopable, in a loss of sympathy for and understanding of the human and non-human, accompanied by the rise of nationalism, collide in silence with stultified invention, as, for example, in Trump’s nominations of Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, his immigration ban, and further deplorable executive orders. Resist Much / Obey Little challenges that drift into a common “normalizing” chord that so much of America’s collective unconscious and corporate media is rife with. That’s a significant accomplishment.

MB: It collects Kent’s work since 2008. As with most of Kent’s writing, it is sui generis. I mean, it is all part of the tradition of satire, satirical resistance animates his work, but each address finds its own particular form, the necessary form. From Middle English rhyme to mini-biographies to prize lists to bumper sticker verse, Kent is always inventing what is necessary to the articulation. It is often hilarious, but always deadly serious. I’m poaching myself from my intro to the book, I admit.

KJ: If I may, and it’s the only thing I will say about the book, and this is entirely Mike’s doing (he is a master of book layout and design): It arguably has the most exciting cover image of any North American poetry book in the last decade. I got lucky.

MB: John Clarke is a sadly under-recognized writer, partly because of his relation to Charles Olson, but largely because he was a deeply democratic person, someone who was committed to his work with no sense of ambition beyond the community of its interest. But I think it was Al Cook who said that Jack went as far beyond Olson as Olson went beyond Pound. The book is a collection of various pieces by Jack. The center of it is a book within a book edited by his friend and colleague, Al Glover, called toward a #6. It is a collection of letters, poems, and bibliography which gives you a strong sense of the complexity, immense range, and dynamic of Jack’s thinking. In addition, there is a long piece called “Lots of Doom” that is a transcription of a “reading” from 1971, three essays he wrote on Charles Olson, and some odds and ends. Lisa Jarnot wrote a terrific introduction and Daniel Zimmerman wraps it up with a profound meditation called “Knowing Jack.” Lisa’s book is a mystery. You could say we commissioned it. So you know it will be perceptive, insightful, and with a sharp edge.

KJ: We also have others in the tentative works: A book of strange and moving serial manifestos by the mysterious OBU group, a book by Laynie Browne, a translation by Chris Daniels of the astonishing and almost hereabouts-unknown Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, a profound and hilarious book of aphorisms by John Bradley, a rich collection of Mike’s own essays, and numerous other surprises to be announced.

DD: I’d like to end our conversation with a poem from Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Would you select one and introduce it?

Mike and Kent: This is the poem, published in 1979, by the great and ridiculously neglected Umbra-group poet Lorenzo Thomas, which opens the book, as epigraph. It’s almost as if he were visited, back then, it seems to us, by some Nostradamus-like vision of January 20th, 2017. We suspect there wasn’t anything “mystical” involved, but there’s something here in the undercurrent, as they say, that seems compellingly channeled across the long present. Listen poets:

Inauguration

The land was there before us Was the land. Then things Began happening fast. Because The bombs us have always work Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us. Because Us has saved the world. Us gave it A particular set of regulations Based on 1) undisputable acumen. 2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately Referred to here as “bull market” And (of course) other irrational factors Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps, Our man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc

— Lorenzo Thomas

Michael Boughn's most recent book, City — A Poem from the End of the World, was published in 2016 by Spuyten Duyvil. Hermetic Divagations — After H.D. is forthcoming in March, 2017 from Swimmers Group in Toronto. Together with Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book for University of California Press. He lives in Toronto.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

February 03, 2017

DD: How did DIALOGIST come into being? Can you give us a brief history of the quarterly?

ML:DIALOGIST’s inception was a response to a self-perceived divide between well-wrought, meaningful, and challenging content and a hierarchical, often censorship-based publishing structure. The latter being the direct, literal sense, as well as the industry’s smattering of personal/house editorial aesthetic that follows the adage for framing all media, that what’s included is just as important as what’s left out. Thereby, and too often, creative voices are segregated into two primary groups: rising and established. Because creative value does not exist along a continuum, so much as within a malleable framework of dialogue, it was a necessary experiment to provide a more open, shared venue for this broad gradient of experience to interact—ideally leading to new, personal explorations of consideration and creation for both readers and contributors.

DD: Can you discuss the dialogue between the visual arts and poetry that is so essential to this journal?

ML: I’ll defer to Jennifer’s take on this one.

JP: Visual Arts and Poetry have dialogue together in the journal by balancing the creative input of the contributors. This allows the readers to experience a diverse range of creative outputs and creates an insightful look into the creative fields. The communication between visual arts and poetry in the journal creates a rhythm for the audience to experience when viewing the journal and creates visual imagery to compliment the written word.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

ML: Submissions review is an inherently intimate process, wherein a certain trust is exchanged between a poem, its speaker, the poet (or however it’s carried out), and an editor. Returning to your first question, not only is my capacity one of a reader, it’s also a necessary burden to serve as a gatekeeper of sorts. Assuming that a submitter is familiar with the content that we put out, that someone has found value in the journal as a collective space is always quite humbling. Although it makes me uneasy to turn away most poems, I feel a unique elation the moment that our team decides to accept a poet’s work. With that work we’re expanding the conversation, and this is a responsibility that I feel our whole team takes very personally.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

ML: Contemporary poetry knows itself quite well by now, so we might ask what’s yet to be done. Because I didn’t come at the “poetry game” with any formal experience, aside from some time in an MFA, I’m admittedly ignorant to the tastes, forms, and schools of thought that have led us here. So for me it’s more a question of what’s left to be said, and noting the present U.S. political cum human rights climate, in conjunction with persisting social, environmental, economic, etc. issues worldwide, there are urgent conversations that we need to be having. Furthermore, important declarations that we need to make. Poetry is, by its nature, at once proletariat and bourgeoisie. Then there’s its middle ground. This is an area that I hope DIALOGIST occupies. To answer your question directly: that we’re still engaging in discourse, investing in discovery, even when things are awry (haven’t they always been?), is encouraging.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

ML: Empathetic inclusivity. Taking the overall example of writing conferences, MFA programs, and top-tier literary/poetry journals, we’re dealing with a class establishment that is self-sustaining at best, and entropically regressive at worst. As a reader foremost, then an editor, I cannot align with the posture of the same panel discussions, the same cliquishness of the same names, and the same subject matter wearing the same coat. Rediscovering our peripheral awareness might remind us of why we do what we do, and why we do it at all. In a way poetry can be a mirror, and that’s certainly important. But we must also remind ourselves that poetry can be a window.

ML: I wonder what Jennifer would add in terms of art.

JP: To add to what Michael has said and in terms of art, it needs more openness to new artists and easier access for upcoming artists to reach a wider audience. As an editor, I strive to search for uniqueness in the art and diversity in what is chosen. Art will always need that search for new perspectives.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

ML: The still unwritten poem of anyone reading this. So mentioned, I’d like to ask who you believe readers should spend time with to better understand the true social implications of contemporary poetry.

ML: In regard to growing uncertainty over the sanctity and equal protection of individual liberties, again fast eroding as a result of Western political developments (or regressions, I will say), maintaining accountability within our global community is a multifaceted undertaking—not least of which is our common duty to honor critical and creative self-expression. I hope that for its present state and future editorial iterations, DIALOGIST’s ultimate purpose is as an unbiased refuge for the arts and a hub for necessary cultural critique. As an immediate and pragmatic request, I encourage people to identify grassroots initiatives from which they gain personal enrichment, and to support them. Whether by word-of-mouth promotion, time volunteered on staff or for public events, or becoming patrons to the comfort of personal budget. Where aid is withheld or rescinded by organizational or governmental powers, there should be a joint imperative to save the greatest soft asset of our shared human experience.

They ask me What’s it like being a brown woman in America? I want to say It’s like screaming in a dream And expecting a reaction.

They ask me What’s it like being an immigrant in America? I want to say It’s like wearing perfume And everyone is allergic.

They ask me What’s it like praying for change in America? I want to say It’s like pressing your ear to the dirt and hoping to hear the sea.

DIALOGIST Managing Editor: Michael Loruss is a native Californian, a veteran of the United States Army, and an alumnus of Berea College, where he studied English literature. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and was a ’13 co-recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his work has been published in Guernica, The Paris-American, PANK, and The Los Angeles Review.

DIALOGIST Art Editor: JenniferPalmer was born and raised in Pennsylvania and currently resides in Kentucky. She holds a BA in Art and Political Science from Cedar Crest College, and a MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Jennifer is an artist and has been featured in New American Paintings and included in the Viewing Program at the Drawing Center in NYC. She currently works at colleges and a university in the greater Louisville area and exhibits her art nationally.

DIALOGIST Poetry Editor: Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize.

January 16, 2017

Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection, Rapture, celebrates the lives fountaining through a single life and transmutes the eddies of those lives into an aria. Like the blossoms seen falling through a kitchen window in McCray’s poem, “The Pear Tree,” the poems in Rapture helicopter to earth, “suicidal brides plummeting.” These poems skitter on the edge of adoration, limned with want, cankered with loss, honeyed with the sweet fearful immensities of the strange thisness shuttling between the heart and the mind. Many voices vertebrae the poems in this book in registers of devotion, passion, ire, sorrow, and jubilation. McCray draws on the details of his birth: his father was a soldier and his mother was a “comfort woman.” In “Bedtime Story # 1” McCray describes his parents after they had first met: “they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:/ the unassuming black and the Korean whore/ in the middle of the Vietnam War.” From these details, McCray explores the complicated notions of Americanness that his life embodies, implies, and challenges: “an extravagance of small pauses,/ / many caesuras.” However, McCray’s work as a whole concerns itself with recreating the infinitesimal moments in a life, situated on the threshold of song, when past, present, and future overlap and we are most ourselves.

McCray’s lines are most themselves when Eros and Thanatos equally inhabit them. In the last lines of the book, McCray redefines “rapture” as the moment before an orgasm, “an old LP, a needle tracing static,/ a record ready to drop.” Meanwhile, outside, walnuts smack on the roof, a cardinal shakes on the line, and “still we refuse to yield/ back into being singular.” For McCray the refusal to be anywhere else but in the posture of eternal embrace constitutes the very groundwork of existence; we are always dying into each other, into our pasts and futures, into our ghosts and regrets. Throughout Rapture, McCray opens a dialogue with his father, whose life and legacy constantly swans into the poems. The poem “Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man,” for example, reads:

Rage is the language of men, layers of particulates fused.

Rage is the wine father pours to the ground

for men whose time has passed. Rage is gripped in the hands

like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.

Rage is a promise kept.

Although rage is part of the vocabulary Rapture sorts through, the real language of this poem and every other poem in this book is love. Whether commemorating the lives of his parents, hailing his beloved, burning down the suburbia of his own adolescence, or elegizing the tragic life and death of the poet, Reetika Vazirani, Sjohnna McCray is driven to the page out of love. Rapture is a reminder that we are at our best when we refuse to yield back into being singular, a timely and timeless collection to laud on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2017.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize,

December 19, 2016

Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook, What Are We Not For, artfully explores what it means to live inside a black queer body at this particular time in American history. Blount’s sinewy poems are bound together with countless silken ties of desire, fear, and affection for the world in all of its wounding might. Ranging from tightly made free verse, to sonnet, to villanelle, these poems perpetually shrapnel into each other. Each poem shuts its mouth “around the rough ramble of wordlessness” and redirects its gaze to the pulsing lycanthropic chiefdom a body carries within its provinces. In this collection, the mutt of the first poem, “Bareback Aubade with the Dog,” who snaps the thin leash of yes, transforms into the werewolf of a later poem, who is beaten “until skin becomes wound/ then scab then hide.” What Susan Howe said of Emily Dickinson could be said of Tommye Blount as well: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender.” However, Blount never forgets the whiplash logic of a culture founded on the destruction of black bodies. As the speaker in “The Tongue” notes: “…I have the tongue/ of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.” What Are We Not For retrieves the seams in the seamless transition from scar tissue to carapace. More importantly, this powerful collection celebrates the “sweet body” and the affirmation that buzzes inside the hive of the self at its most sated and at its most insatiable.

For Blount, nevertheless, the sweet body is also the site of unspeakable pain. A dog, forever barking, forever muzzled, runs through these poems toward that pain. The figure of Pinocchio, which recurs throughout the poems, foregrounds that pain in his interrogations of realness. “Geppetto’s Lament” begins: “Off to mess with what I made him, the boy/ forgets he is not a boy. Forgets these/ strings and this paddle, shaped like a cross, are/ in my hands.” The pain of Pinocchio, who in the poem, “Pine,” cuts the inside of his thighs with his father’s whittling knife, emblematizes the struggle of anyone who attempts to define the self against normative cultural expectations. Blount deftly questions the surreptitious pacts and the hidden strings that bind son to father, beloved to lover, lynching victim to crowd, body to spirit, spirit to word. As the title poem notes:

What Are We Not For

but to be broken like the deer resting on the side of the highway, in a bed made of

its insides? Isn’t the scene always the same—the rump and legs frozen in one last kick?

I, too, have lost my gaze, the grip of the wheel— like the one that plowed into

the deer. Wheel, will—it’s all the same. And the ear does fail me at times, as it must have the deer

that should have listened better. Francine, on the other end of the line, tells me I’m not listening; to listen

to my body or I won’t last long. We never last long, do we? It all breaks— the line pulsing forward, the line pause,

the long bone of it all. After all, I am a broken animal. I am brokered in the name of the wheel.

Despite this constant breaking, Tommye Blount stays on the line. He knows that our bodies may be museums, but they contain more than mere artifact. The lynching of Frank Embree in 1899 appears in one window of the body, right next to Matthew Shepard’s murderer, Aaron McKinney, in 1998. And yet, if the body is a site of trauma, it is also a dance floor. Channeling the famous choreographer, Willi Ninja, Blount defiantly exclaims, “Bitch, give me a body/ and I will show you how it works” and jubilantly continues: “One day I will show you the world/ is one big ass ball—/ / a house run by mothers.” Reading this chapbook, one husbands risk and want and pain and sorrow, only to access ultimately such unfettered joy. Reading What Are We Not For is as necessary as breathing, grieving, and loving.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize,

November 21, 2016

"…he was booking out in all these tank towns, playing the rotary clubs, the Kiwanis clubs, and the American Legion hall, and he just wasn't making it, but he had all these wonderful things going on inside of him, all these greens and yellows and all these oranges…"

Joe Weil’s latest poetry collection, A Night in Duluth, owes as much to Charles Mingus, Groucho Marx, Stan Laurel, Bert Williams, and the Sermon on the Mount, as it does to the many poetic traditions it evokes and overturns (Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams & Modernism, Charles Olson & Objectivism, Frank O’Hara & the New York School, Robert Lowell & Confessionalism, and so on). Weil is a poet in the tradition of Coyote from Native American folklore; his best poems provoke, capsize, unsettle, and upend, even as they keen, rejoice, rage, pray, and elevate. Each poem in A Night in Duluth functions as a miniature vaudeville stage, and like any good vaudeville show, each poem contains a variety of cultural spectacles which can be perceived from a variety of critical vantage points; Weil ranges from the sacred to the profane, from the working class to the neoliberal, from the puritanical to the licentious, from shtick to profundity. The watchword for Weil’s poetry, as it was for any vaudeville act, is variety. From the motley, from the variegated, and from the broken, Weil assembles a space in which he might examine issues of American identity. It is within this true swing state—as Weil shifts between registers, syntaxes, idioms, and dictions—where issues of diversity, tolerance, democracy, and the worth of the individual might be articulated, challenged, erased, elided, and, finally, partially, understood.

A Night in Duluth reads as a fractal narrative (as if Samuel Beckett had worked in a factory for twenty years, then sat in an easy chair watching Horse Feathers on an infinite loop, and recorded his thoughts with a golf course pencil in verse on the back of a Sears and Roebuck parlor guitar), each poem built upon digressions and unfolding in a string of gags, non sequiturs, and associational leaps, not unlike a comic routine. Weil’s poem, “Things I Hate,” provides a good example of how meaning skitters and scuttles into being throughout the collection. The first half of the poem reads:

Hate being busy hate others going on and on about being busy hate the business of being busy hate how people in America are even busy being reflective. Hate the schedules of reflection. Hate the fucking schedules hate the lists, the doing of this and the undoing of that hate that I can’t lick the freckle from my nose and swallow it and turn into a field of wild mushrooms hate that no one ever gives me a big waxy turnip and says, “Here pal, here’s a big waxy turnip.” Hate that all the good surprises in my life lie behind me like so many run over squirrels—their fluffy tails combed by the wind, crushed by an 18 wheeler driven by an asthmatic who has a pair of lucky sunglasses (which he just lost) hate that some positive thinker might stand in the middle of this poem and say: “How do you know all the good surprises in your life lie behind you?”

This fractal lyric embodies the strategies and preoccupations of Weil’s work as a whole. “Things I Hate” exemplifies the incantatory momentum present everywhere in A Night in Duluth, propelled by the anaphora of ideation as much as by anaphora itself. Weil loafs and invites his soul to philosophize with a hammer, to inveigh against “the schedules of reflection” you might scroll through on Facebook and reaffirm on Twitter. Weil’s most apparent concern in “Things I Hate,” and everywhere else in this collection, is to overturn pieties, to lob a metapoetic Looney Tunes turnip into the clockwork of his own words, to perform a Duck Soup mirror dance between the Joe Weil who worked as a toolmaker and shop steward for twenty years in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the Joe Weil who works as a University professor today in upstate New York. However, Weil’s ulterior, omnipresent, and most pressing concern is to articulate his vision of a Eucharistic reality in which the lowly, the unsought, the downtrodden, and the wrecked are uplifted in the hard-fought duende and earned communion of poetry.

For all of the searing and diffuse cultural critiques found in A Night in Duluth, the collection reveals itself constantly in its deep intimacy and vulnerability. Time and again throughout the book, poems slough off their glossolalia, and shed any ironic (or conventional, or sophisticated) conception of “voice,” as Weil steps forth. Weil writes as a father and husband, confronting mortality, attempting to explain himself, his love, and his existence, to his wife and to his young children. As Weil notes in “Farewell (Again)”:

I came into the world to be— to be slaughtered, but I forgot to be childless, to be expendable. I write this poem so that my children will understand. I loved them. It is nothing incredible. It is a bowl of sugar encircled by bees in a diner where the food may not have been very good, and the service stank. I spent my life in such places.

These are the insights of a man who has pursued his enthusiasms through an odyssey of dead end jobs and nightshifts, who fell in love with poetry because he was already in love with the world, who wants only to tell the sky that it has been handcuffed to a rose, and who announces in every line: “Yes, I am an origin of lilac.” These are also the insights of a perpetual outsider, a man who knows, as the poet Joe Salerno did, that “poetry is the art of not succeeding.”

Notwithstanding his insights as an outsider, Weil is a consummate showman, for whom a virtuoso performance might equally come either from reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich or from contemplating a line of bad poetry written by an undergraduate student. Weil, the showman, understands, along with P.T. Barnum, that the foundation of all American show business is the practical joke. The hunger for the implausible—the charm in “charms,” the romance of the unreal—drives us to the sideshow. As our convictions break apart like Pangea, Weil encourages us to dial the light and to see beyond the pixel, to gather paradise in arnica, eyebright, ragweed, and the Queen Anne ’s lace bouquet of unromantic daily love. In “Fire Birds” Weil warns:

Soon they will come for me with peace cleavers and serenity axes their yoga pants outlawed in Montana. They will say, “You’re not being positive.” They will cut my throat for peace…

Here, Weil places in dialogue the avatars of white middle class liberalism with the fascism of the far right. In a culture where “everyone wants something new,” and no one can agree on the facts, Weil embraces old umbers and magentas the color of rain water; he argues for the sound of gas from a burner flicking on in a memory of a place you once called home. A Night in Duluth is full of such simple pleasures, and, as William Carlos Williams was fond of remarking at poetry readings: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t poetry.” With Joe Weil, it’s always a pleasure and it’s always poetry.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

November 05, 2016

DD: Susan Howe famously ends her book, My Emily Dickinson, with the lines: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame.” Using these lines as a point of departure, could you begin by talking about the transformative power of poetry?

CM: Every great poem that I’ve read (or any great work of art for the matter) has so deeply engaged me that I have the feeling of being completely separated from myself and fully incorporated into the world of the speaker. I liken it to a religious and mystical out of body experience. I get this way every time I read the work of Theodore Roethke, and hearing him read it work only enhances this experience for me.

RG: I’m especially moved by “Poetry is redemption from pessimism,” as I spent much of my younger days mired in unnecessary negativity. I cannot overstate the vital role poetry played in pulling me out it. I think if I’d had a more passionate introduction to poetry earlier in life, I could have saved myself a lot of self-imposed trouble. Big claim, I know, but I think about reading Joe Bolton for the first time. Up to that point, I’d never read anyone that I found more authentic, more familiar. It seemed to me that he tore himself apart attempting to rend meaning from a world that he either didn’t understand, or that he understood all too well, and so the world didn’t get him. That, of course, I realized was a better evaluation of myself than of his work, and that realization proved to be quite the gut-check, as Bolton killed himself when he was just 28. My redemption from pessimism began with Bolton. That’s the transformative power of poetry.

CM: Arcadia started as a project of some MFA students at the University of Central Oklahoma. I didn’t start the program until a year after the other guys, and I joined them during production of our second issue. I find it funny that a lot of people, including founding editors, sometimes mistake me as being here from beginning.

RG: Yes, Arcadia began like I expect many lit mags begin: a small group of writers in a program think they have something to add to the literary conversation. And so it was with us. I can’t speak for the others, but I’m not sure I had the confidence at that time to think I had anything to add, I just really wanted to be a part of it.

It was Chase Dearinger’s idea. After a fiction class, he told fellow students what he wanted to do and invited us to participate. I was shy, so I didn’t speak up at the moment, but I hurried home to email him. Man, it’s funny to think about, but I was scared he wouldn’t need me, that my shyness had cost me a spot. I imagined everyone in the class had already bombarded him and filled all these imaginary positions. I don’t know how many classes he solicited, but in the end, only four reached out to him.

DD: Arcadia Press has published two poetry chapbooks, so far, and is soon to publish its third, With Porcupineby Jacob Oet. Could you tell us about this poet and this collection?

CM: I believe Jacob Oet is the next Russell Edson. Oet’s excellent use of dark humor, absurdity, and surrealism—that Edson was so well known for—is presented flawlessly here. It’s a hilarious but thoughtful read. We were very lucky to snag this.

RG: Very lucky. Jacob Oet is a gifted young poet. Reading through, With Porcupine, for the first time, I kept thinking about Wallace Stevens’ comment, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” By the end, there was no doubt Jacob is making his contributions. This is one wildly imaginative, funny and cohesive collection of poems that continues to surprise through to the last page.

DD: The first two chapbooks you published, Nicole Santalucia’s Driving Yourself to Jail in Julyand Sharon Charde’s Incendiary are united by their direct engagement with different forms of personal trauma. What did you find most compelling in these two collections?

CM: What really struck me about these two collections is that they are so very personal and yet, so universal. It’s very easy for less-skilled poets to dive too far into themselves and completely alienate the reader. These women didn’t do that. They accomplished the difficult task of making their own struggles completely relatable, which shows their great skill.

RG: Nicole’s lasting effect on me is her gritty, late turns. She can really end a poem. I still go back to that collection when I need to remind myself how it’s done. Reminds me a little of Diana Goetsch’s work in that way. Sharon, on the other hand, struck me with her refined way of dealing with grief and longing without ever slipping into maudlin territory.

DD: Oklahoma is the birthplace of John Berryman and N. Scott Momaday. How has living in this state influenced your life as a writer and editor?

CM: I was born here, grew up here, and went to college and grad school here. I haven’t lived anywhere else, so Oklahoma inevitably shows up in all of my literary work. Because of this, I tend to personally favor and enjoy works that feature Oklahoma, the Southwest, or rural areas in general.

RG: Same here. Small town Oklahoma born and bred. When I grew up, there was no writing community that I was aware of. Creative writing/reading wasn’t stressed in school, at home, or the community at large. What was most emphasized was good manners and work ethic, so it took quite a while before I even knew I liked literature. I credit The Doors for that. Thank goodness the internet existed by that time or I may have never read the inciting piece, Oedipus Rex. I bumbled around in my thirties hovering between careers, trying to figure out if I was a writer or not, then I learned UCO had plans to offer the state’s first MFA program. I jumped on it. That gave me my first look at a writing community. Perhaps it was there all along, and I just couldn’t see it. Small towns are pretty insulated.

I think having lived so long in limbo concerning the quality of my own writing drives my desire to foster lasting relationships with those we publish, particularly young writers. It’s refreshing to see them already into it, far better than I was at their age, and then getting to participate in some small way in their growth.

DD: How has your work as an editor and chapbook publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

CM: I’ve had many bouts with writing block, but I find that every time I review a submission, it inspires me to write and gradually helps me out of my rut. Because of this, when I was a poetry editor, I tended to put an intense focus on reading every single submission, because it was not only beneficial for my own writing but also guaranteed each writer received fair consideration.

RG: Reading submissions does have a way of keeping me fresh and ever-critical of my own work. It’s a constant reminder of how every single line and word must move, else the dreaded rejection. It’s also a reminder that good poems are rejected for many reasons beyond whether the work is good enough or not.

I am extremely critical of my own work. As a result, I have to sit on most poems a long time before I consider sending them out. Usually, there must first be a moment when my whole being screams out, “Damn, that’s it, you got it.” This makes me a very critical editor. Other people’s poems must hit me the same way. As a result, our acceptance rate has historically been low. I remember one issue where I found only two poems that I wanted to publish. And I recall this tense half hour reading Nicole Santalucia’s chapbook submission where I could scarcely breathe I was rooting for her so hard to finish as strong as she began. You see it all the time. A great start then the line goes slack. What a rush when it doesn’t.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

CM: The best experience I’ve had so far is working with Jacob Oet on some pieces from With Porcupine. I’m a huge fan of the chapbook, so I had a great time going over some suggestions with him, many of which accepted. Having him accept my suggestions was incredibly motivating in creating my own work, not to mention it was like having one of my favorite bands ask for input on some of their song lyrics.

RG: Monet Thomas. I’ll never forget her. This was about five or six years ago. I was poetry editor, and though we were still learning how to do what we do, we were receiving thousands of submissions by that time. She had sent three poems, her first poetry submission ever I believe. One of the poems, “Another Confession,” was just on the cusp of working. I was sending out dozens of rejections a day, but I kept hers in my queue, until, finally, I rejected the poem. I did, however, take a moment to explain why and then encouraged her to keep working it, which she did. A few months later, she resubmitted the poem. After some back and forth editing, I published it.

What made had this such a beautiful editing experience was that, as a writer, I knew how encouraging it could be to receive ink from an editor. That’s why I took the time to do it in the first place. But I learned very quickly that providing ink doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be received with the same mutual appreciation and admiration that it was written. Ms. Thomas got it. She got it, she ran with it, and it paid off.

Not long after sending her the rejection, a friend of mine called to say she’d been doing a search for Arcadia online and came across a blog entry from Ms. Thomas in which she describes the initial rejection experience from her perspective. She was encouraged, elated. It was inspiring. For years now, when those rare discouraging moments as an editor arise, I pull up that blog. Thank you, Monet.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

CM: The quality of work coming from young people is astounding, and makes me very excited about the future of poetry. We often don’t read cover letters until after we read a piece, so Roy and I were discussing how we were shocked to find out Alex Greenberg, a contributor and featured poet for our newest issue, was only 16. If we have writers in their teens writing such great work, I can’t imagine what they’ll write as they get older.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

CM: Patience.

We are living in trying times with all of the police brutality, the Flint Water Crisis, The Dakota Pipeline, and a vicious hateful xenophobe is a nominee for President, just to name a few examples. With the current climate, it’s easy for poets to immediately spew angry and emotional responses to cope with the injustices. I think the problem with this heavily emotional type of poetry can actually keep the reader from engaging in the work. The piece can become more about the speaker’s anger rather than the collective anger present in society today. Stephen Dobyns has this wonderful passage in Best Words, Best Order in which he states “the main reason this sense of self damages the poet is that it violates the poet’s relationship with the audience. Instead of audience and poet being in the same boat, the attitude of the poet as hero creates a situation where the poet is in a special boat.”

Like Dobyns, I always felt that that overly emotional and angry poems all but eliminate the reader’s involvement with the piece. If the poet can simply take some time to reflect on an injustice, and present the subject with a newfound perspective, the piece could become more successful by actually incorporating the reader.

RG: I can’t believe I’m about to go where I’m about to go, but to me, what American poetry needs is more support from beyond the subculture of poetry and more active efforts from poets to engage with communities outside of poetry. There’s a great article about this online at The Atlantic, by Dana Gioia called, “Can Poetry Matter?” Poets will always read poets. But you know who really needs to read poetry? Everyone. And start them young. I don’t mean have them read a bunch of critical theory designed to help students pass state tests. How is critical theory going to inspire teenagers? I mean the reading of poetry for the pure joy of it. Many teachers agree, but there’s little they can do. They’re judged quantitatively, not on graduating well-rounded, open-minded young adults. The same goes for most of the arts.

I don’t think this answers what you were asking, but I just read the article recently, and it has been on my mind. My primary point is that I think poetry itself needs nothing from us. It will evolve naturally and the geniuses among us will always emerge. You asked earlier about the transformative power of poetry. Well, that power is severely limited if the only ones reading and caring about poetry are poets.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

CM: “Let Us Consider” by Russel Edson. It’s easily his most beautiful work, and I can’t say how much it’s inspired my own poetry.

RG: Oh wow, just one? For a long time I would have said Joe Bolton’s, “The Ohio.” Today, the happy, married me, I think I could chant forever Anita Barrows’ and Joanna Macy’s translation of Rilke’s, “The First Elegy.” “Fling the nothing you are grasping / out into the spaces we breathe.”

DD: The Arcadia Press website has recently been relaunched. Can you tell us about the recent changes?

CM: Since the magazine has evolved and grown so much, we thought our website should, too. We wanted something more professional without betraying our rustic roots. I think the new website accomplishes that.

RG: Yes, now that we have a real handle on who we are in terms of mission and what we want to contribute to the Oklahoma and Great Plains literary scene, a rebrand was in order. We’ve been designing our own websites up to this point. It was time to bring in a professional.

DD: Arcadia Press has also published some excellent fiction chapbooks and some albums of regional music. Can you tell us about these endeavors? Also can you tell us a little bit about the other members of the Arcadia team?

CM: We wanted to distinguish ourselves from other literary magazines. Poetry chapbooks are everywhere, but you don’t see a lot of fiction chapbooks. A lit magazine with a CD is even rarer, but it fits with our goal of showcasing all types of art.

We founded the magazine as students and most of our department editors are students or joined when they were students themselves. Our Editor-in-chief, Chase Dearinger, met Michael Palmer, Chad Abushanab, and John Peery when they were all students at Texas Tech. Alban Fischer has been designing for us since issue 9.1, and we like his work so much that he’s now also our art editor. Ann Glaviano is terrific copy editor and has done invaluable work for us with our grant proposals. If you need either of these, I suggest you check her out. And of course, there’s Benjamin Reed.

RG: Our history with Ben goes back to 2011 when we published his fine story, “King of the Apes.” As soon as we decided to incorporate guest editors into our scheme, he was first guy we thought of. He was great to work with, and he assembled an exceptional issue, so when we had an opening for a fiction editor, we offered it to him. He graciously accepted and has been killing it ever since.

And Corey’s right on the money concerning Ann and Alban. The addition of these two has instantly leveled up our game in terms of professionalism. Besides ensuring clean copy, Ann also streamlined our editing processes and was instrumental in giving shape to our new mission. And Alban’s design aesthetic never fails surprise me. Just stunning work.

I’m really happy with all our recent additions to Arcadia. We’ve found some really talented, passionate editors, all of them. Michael, for instance, over the last year, has taken the nonfiction department from the fringe to battling for the forefront. His selections for the current issue blew me away. Chad hasn’t been poetry editor long, but he’s already bringing a lot to the table. His selection for winner of the Dead Bison Editor’s Prize in poetry was splendid. He has a keen eye for craft. And our music editor, John is a godsend. I don’t know how we ever put together an album without him. I loved what he did with the Roanoke album.

DD:Arcadia’s Issue 10.1, published in spring 2016, featured Ito Romo as the guest editor. The issue was titled, The New Chican@. Please tell us about this excellent issue.

CM: Being a Chicano myself, it was wonderful to have an entire issue devoted to my culture, and to expose our readers to this culture through such talented writers and Vincent Valdez’s mesmerizing art. We had the pleasure of meeting most of these writers in person at our launch reading for the issue, and my signed copy of 10.1 is one of my dearest possessions. I’m also convinced there’s no nicer and talented guy on earth than Ito Romo.

RG: Man, it was an excellent issue wasn’t it? And beautiful, too. It’s no accident that it’s our bestselling issue to date. Over the last couple of years, we’ve come to realize that we haven’t been doing enough to seek out and provide space for marginalized voices.

Enter Ito. This is a guy you can’t find enough good words to describe how amazing he is. Talented, humble, big-hearted, absolutely the most entertaining reader of his own work I’ve ever heard. And his writing. If you haven’t read his book of short stories, The Border is Burning, you should. It’ll destroy you. Just when you think he can’t hurt you further, the next story will. But what really makes his writing so appealing isn’t the grit, the devastation, or even the humanity he never fails eek out of the darkness. It’s his authenticity, so clear and pristine it affects every word, every image, and that’s the editorial focus he brought to the issue.

He selected just four writers and one visual artist to fill out his vision, which, given that the magazine is 100 pages, functions almost like mini-chapbooks for the contributors. We wound up with a stark, gorgeous black and white collection of brilliant work that pops with more arresting visual art than anything else we’ve produced. I also appreciate that Ito included not only Texas luminaries Sarah Cortez, Tim Z. Hernandez, Octavio Quintanilla, and Vincent Valdez, but he also incorporated work from new writer, Luke Neftali Villafranca. In Ito’s intro, he writes:

“I wanted to put together a group of artists who, with their art, be it visual or literary, tell a story honestly and beautifully—those were my only criteria. I’ve chosen a group of Mexican American artists who have recreated for us, with images and words, the current strange and dark malaise of the invisible, of the forgotten.

It is a new social realism, a mestizaje of artistic form and commentary that takes from the old as well as from the contemporary to forge an original voice that imagines for us that which we can no longer imagine, or choose not to—a world whose painful and miserable realness distracts us, shakes us, wakes us from our somnambulistic media dream.

[These artists] shatter the many levels of the American illusion of stereotype and fetishization with unmatched artistic skill, and most importantly, because they demand we recognize the human dignity of the people in their work, I call them the New Chican@s.

I hope they make your heart beat faster. I hope they make you feel again.”

Ito Romo accomplished his goal.

DD: What does the future hold in store for Arcadia Press?

CM: We’re currently working on an online feature called Dead Bison where we highlight art and literature from marginalized communities in the Great Plains region. We hope to have the first installment out sometime late this year or early next year.

RG: Last year we partnered with the downtown location of the OKC Metro Library System, OKC Red Earth MFA, and the Oklahoma Arts Council to organize the first OKC LitFest, which, like Dead Bison, plays an integral role in our new mission: to cultivate and promote the voices of the Great Plains through the development of Oklahoma City as a celebrated center for literary arts.

We’re working hard to expand our partnerships this year to help us accomplish this task.

The Happiest Place on Earth contains no legal abortion clinics, so Mickey had to drive Minnie over to the breakfast-cereal cartoon-mascot ghetto, where the Kellogg’s Raisin Bran sun carved out two scoops of baby, its instruments shining red in its never-dawn rays. After the procedure, two twittering bluebird nurses tried to criss-cross comical white band-aids across her sore black patootie, but Minnie peeled them off. No one back home must suspect.

The mice ran into Dig’em Frog in the parking lot, rubbing the insides of his elbows, blocking the shortest route to their jalopy, croaking for more Smacks, a little sugar, a little honey, a little puffed wheat. Were they holding? Could they help an amphibian out? Mickey peeled off a ten and avoided eye contact. Then another twenty for the frog to forget he had seen them.

Once back in the car, they locked the doors, rolled up the windows, and drove in near-silence back to Anaheim, speaking only in falsettos to negotiate what to order from Zankou Chicken. They decided on shawarma, but Minnie broke into squeaky sobs when the cook started carving slices off the meat rotating on the spit. Maybe it was time to give vegetarianism another try, just for a while.

RG: I always loved this one by Johnathon Williams:

Sawdust

The whole world took to dwindling, that summer my father bought the saw – the black pines sapless, moaning in the wind, the apple tree blighted, its fallen fruit pockmarked by crows, their delicate, Y-shaped feet.

We watched from the porch as fireflies lighted lost in the ghost wheat. The barn door glowed like the ambulance bay at the county ER, hot steel screaming through the tender boards, each pallet still warm from the kiln.

Months later, the banks began to call, my father’s credit exhausted at Sears and every other store, and he slumped over the dinner table, blinking sawdust into a plate of black-eyed peas. No one spoke. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Roy Giles’ poetry and fiction have appeared in Eclectica, Eclectica Magazine 20th Anniversary Fiction Anthology, Ninth Letter,C4 Fiction Anthology, among others. His critical essays in theater won him a fellowship to the National Critics Institute at the Kennedy Center, and he has had several plays produced regionally. He currently serves as senior editor for Arcadia.

Corey Don Mingura received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma in May 2011. His works of fiction and poetry have appeared inThe Acentos Review, The Writing Disorder,Westview,Eclectica, Midwestern Gothic, and The Oklahoma Review, among many others. He currently serves as Managing Editor ofArcadia. Mingura is a Mexican-American native of Hollis, Oklahoma and currently resides in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight(Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York. He is the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

October 17, 2016

Phillip B. Williams' debut collection, Thief in the Interior, absconds with luminous witness from the darkest places in our culture: the shadow’s hem, the bull’s corpse, the trash bag full of dismembered body parts, and the spinning noose. In poem after poem, Williams sings in counterpoint to violent anthems composed in the American grain; Williams sings against “one nation coughing up black tongues.” He sings for the vanished, for the haunted, for the tortured, for the lost, for the place on the horizon where the little boat of the human body disappears in a wingdom of unending grace. Thief in the Interior moves gracefully from pastoral through elegy to epithalamion; along the way, Williams deftly vivisects the sonnet and explores the lyric possibilities of forms as disparate as the calligram and the pecha kucha. More importantly, Williams applies his dynamic syntax to an exploration of the buoyant wreckage inside the self, which might allow one to endure “the alluvial earth of grief” and “the hostile enigma” of misogyny, racism, and homophobia confronted daily in these United States.

Williams divides Thief into four sections. The first section begins with the poem, “Bound,” a poem that questions heteronormative cultural expectations and the strictures imposed by others on the self. Williams continues throughout this opening section to elaborate a series of tropes centered on decaying and broken bodies: a rotting bull’s carcass, lynched black bodies, a lacerated wrist. Williams nests these tropes within hallucinatory pastoral imagery. Reading this section is like listening to Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit” backwards underwater. The second section of the book consists of one long poem, “Witness,” which details the death and dismemberment of a nineteen year old gay black man, named Rashawn Brazell. “Witness” provides a keening meditation on the Brazell case, which both celebrates the life of the victim and ruminates on the broader cultural implications of this murder. As Williams puts it, the poem attempts to “tell how a city phantoms a boy, phantoms all witnesses.” The third and fourth section of the book continue to explore the personal repercussions of this type of phantoming.

In these two concluding sections, Williams shifts back and forth between threnody and serenade. Perhaps the finest poem in Thief occurs in the final section. “Do-rag” reads in full:

O darling, the moon did not disrobe you. You fell asleep that way, nude and capsized by our wine, our Bump

mistress, poinsettia, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. You can quote verbatim an entire album

of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony with your ass in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. They mince syllables

as you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your home when your homies aren’t near

enough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved them

so much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneering

when an usher enters. Never mind that. The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways

to keep him from spilling what no one would understand: you call me God when it gets good though I do not exist to you

outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.

In many respects “Do-rag” is emblematic of the collection as a whole. Here, Williams begins by apostrophizing the beloved in a manner at once intimate and chiding. The motion in “Do-rag,” as everywhere else in Thief, is both intensely private and raucously public. We are ushered into a bedroom, into an interior monologue, into a dialogue with a lover, into a conversation with black culture, into a colloquy with American culture as a whole at this very moment, into an endless symposium on the self. Deep inside this nested parleying, Williams’ “fists that bloomed like devotions” signal strength and hope and love.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

September 30, 2016

DD:Four Way Books began in 1991, as a venture between you and your graduate school friends: Beth Stahlecker, Jane Brox, Dzivinia Orlowsky, and Helen Fremont. How have these friendships influenced the evolution and tenor of the press?

MR: We really began in 1993, with first books in 1995. Brox, Orlowsky and Fremont ceased working for the press early on but have remained treasured friends. And I know that they are hugely proud of Four Way Books and of the time and energy that they contributed to the press. Beth Stahlecker, sadly, passed away in 1991 when the press was but a whisper between us. We published her first book posthumously and established a series in her name, The Stahlecker Series, for first and second books of poetry.

DD: In 2012, Jeremy Glazier wrote an excellent overview of the first twenty years of Four Way Books for the LA Review of Books. Gregory Pardlo’s Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and Four Way Books continues to receive the critical and popular attention it deserves. Since 2012, what have been some of the other highlights in the story of Four Way Books?

MR: I would have to say Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book has been thrilling to work on, both in manuscript form and as a finished book. And I’ve loved working with Karen Brennan on little dark – she’s such a wonderfully eccentric writer, and such a brilliant craftswoman. (We have also just released her book of short fiction, Monsters). I struggle to highlight just these when I am so enthusiastic about the books we publish, all.

DD: Pardlo’s Digest is remarkable for so many reasons. One reason I admire it is for the way the poems dramatize cognition, and yet remain so tied to the heart. Pardlo gives us Deleuze and Guattari along with an aisle in the Fulton Street Foodtown. The work of a father with young children is held in equal esteem with the work of the philosopher and poet. All the poems in this collection feel so timely and timeless and essential. What do you find most compelling about this collection?

MR: I am glad that you appreciate Digest for the terrific collection that it is. I guess what I love about the poems – from the first time I heard them to reading them in manuscript then in book form—is the readability of the poems themselves. Whether lyric poem or poem driven more by narrative, whether he is digging close to his feet or throwing the shovel further out, these are poems that speak plainly about complicated sometimes tangled issues. They touch the heart and light up the brain.

DD: Present day Brooklyn is so palpable in all of its contradictions and nuance in Digest. The story of Four Way Books is inextricably linked with the spiritual topography of New York City. Can you tell us about this link? What does New York mean to you? What does New York mean for poetry?

JFM: I love this city, I truly do. I’m Angeleno by birth and temperament, so living in New York is at least partially anthropological, a study in compression and speed and experiments in stress. The city is unforgiving; it forces choice, and its luxuries are rarely free.

Recently I was at a talk with Ben Lerner on his new book The Hatred of Poetry and he mentioned that so much about what people hate about poets is tied up in that Whitman phrase “I loaf and invite my soul”. That whatever Whitman's intentions, there is an image in the broader pop culture of poets as indolent, self-indulgent sponges. Perhaps that is true of poets who do not live here; certainly I have met people who write with a casual ease, and I genuinely respect that as a way of working. But the poets that I know writing in New York now do not treat poetry lightly; they write under that same pressure and drive. Each word accounts for itself on the page. The poem pays its own rent.

MR: As for myself, I moved here from the Boston area. It was my intention to forego college and move to Washington Square Park where I knew I would become best friends with the poets there. “Over my dead body,” cried my father. I went to NYU, on the border of the park, and then transferred to the New School. I devoured poetry. I’d self-identified as a poet at 12 and I read, wrote, read and wrote around the clock. NYC, it seemed to me, was the only place to live. I went to readings every night, and all day and night on weekends. Over time, I’ve become more reclusive and the city has less importance to me as a writer. Having run 3 reading series for decades, along with other activities, I’m a bit burned out, in truth and place = NYC—plays less of a role in my poetry life. At least I think it does. I might be very wrong about that. And certainly, when I listened to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” every spring overlooking the Hudson, I think of Whitman and his beloved NY and look at the river, and then down my own street in Manhattan and think this is one hell of a back yard to pull from. Yet, New England is what really runs through my blood – its fields, sea, rivers, lakes, mountains. The hot, steamy summers, stilled town commons, white, green or black shuttered homes, lemonade mid-afternoon, quiet, easy. I don’t live there now, but do my best to be in New England whenever I can.

So, my relationship to NYC has changed as I’ve grown up in the poetry world – it seems less urgent a relationship than it used to. For poetry? I couldn’t venture to say.

DD: Cynthia Cruz’s newest collection, How the End Begins, startled and disarmed me. The poems are like tiny dioramas of wild longing and mortal desperation, like Emily Dickinson wielding Kafka’s ice-axe. One characteristic couplet from her poem, “Budapest,” comes to mind: “And who said I couldn’t/ die inside the warm balm of a lullaby.” Can you talk about this collection and how it continues the conversation begun in the other collections of Cruz published by Four Way Books: Wunderkammer (2014) and The Glimmering Room (2012)?

RM: Cruz's poems are shockingly hot in the way that only something very cold can be. She is a precise writer and what we see over the span of Cruz's recent collections with Four Way Books is an effort to continually renew and expand language—Cruz's articulation and exploration of the themes she is passionate about. The Glimmering Room uses dramatic personae, monologues, and characters. Wunderkammer, as the title implies, is a cabinet of wonders, filled with precious (often troubling) miniatures. How the End Begins stretches its address, embracing beginnings and endings at once, as evidenced in the title (also a sequence of poems), and everything in between (“The Birthday Ceremony”.) Her voice, her inventiveness, and her dexterity create poems as harrowing as they are beautiful.

DD: Four Way Books has cultivated relationships with many poets. You’ve published several notable collections by C. Dale Young and Kevin Prufer, for example. How does the editorial process change when you are working with an author over the course of several collections?

MR: C. Dale Young has published three poetry collections with us and one, his first, with Northwestern. We are now working on his debut fiction collection, The Affliction, which comprised of linked stories, you might even call it a novel in stories. C. Dale delivers nearly finished books, the editing that I do for him really addresses stylistic issues and I always defer to him, as any good editor does.

While I look at ordering decisions he’s made, and also look to see if there are poems yet to be written or poems that just aren’t needed in the books, I know that C. Dale has brought his manuscript through the wringer before submitting it to me. Same with his fiction collection, which I am editing now. While we’ve had a few discussions about the characters themselves, their motivations, conflicts, etc., the stories, I find, are beautifully crafted and realized. With CDY, I really challenge some stylistic decisions, which is an important job in itself.

Other authors turn in less realized manuscripts and the job then is to work with them over time, looking at multiple drafts, thinking about inclusion and exclusion of poems and stories, challenging the content and the ordering of material. A manuscript might go through revision, back and forth with me, over a year or more. It’s a thrilling experience for me, and I trust for them, to see fine collections become fully explored and turned on their sides to stand upright and even stronger for the work we do together.

SB: Kevin and I have worked together on four books now: we have a deep sense of each other as writers and readers, and probably anticipate each other's thoughts and reactions pretty well. A shift for me has been that I can't help but see poems and collections in relation to each other, so whereas with National Anthem and In a Beautiful Country we spent a lot of time talking about order and particular poetic strategies (the section breaks mid-sentence, the role of rhyme, tone in general--) now I am most interested in the ways his new ms., How He Loved Them, shows us a mind we haven't seen before, or a way of working and thinking and reckoning with the world that feels Pruferian and familiar and also new. I really trust Kevin and the ways he pushes himself. I think (I hope!) he feels something similar about the way I read the poems. They are utterly his and I love them, and then in addition, it feels like a collaborative and valuable endeavor to work together on how best to present them as a body to the world.

DD: Martha, you are a talented poet yourself. Your collection Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004) has been a favorite of mine for several years. Anyone who has lost a parent will gather much solace and strength from this remarkable book. Your poems “My Brain was Enormous” and the title poem, “Mother, Quiet,” are particular favorites of mine. You explore the contours of grief and loss throughout this collection bluntly, but also in a fragmented fashion. Thank you for writing this book. What did you learn about loss, grief, yourself, your mother, and poetry throughout the writing of Mother Quiet?

MR: I am not sure that I learned about loss or grief from writing this book per se. What I learned, and continue to learn, is that presenting an emotional narrative, based in a life or imagined, is always challenging. I did not set out to write about my/a mother or loss of mind to disease, or, or, or. My books tend to become poetic sequences, and I kind of see all of them running into each other – At the Gate moves into Perfect Disappearance which moves into Mother Quiet which moves into the Beds. My 5th collection, The Thin Wall, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, is a departure from the others, a sequence of sorts too, but less autobiographical in nature (by that I mean that autobiographical and not, my other collections read as autobiography to a reader, I am aware of this, and may be in part or not, that’s for me to know!) Anyway, this work is more eccentric, I would say, and the narrative threads of the highly lyric poems are even more disrupted than in past books. I would say, though, that with the other books, there are strong tethers that run through, poem to poem. Back to your question about grief and loss – I don’t deal with either well in my life – I am a thin-skinned person when out of my emotional comfort zone. But action – of any kind – writing, reading, socializing, working – reminds me that what ails does not take up 100 per cent of my brain and heart – ever. There is more to the life than the problem the life faces at a given moment. So the act of writing, it seems to me, for me, makes me healthier at that moment. I am doing what I need to be doing. I am doing something that no one else can touch. I hope that makes sense to you!

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

MR: My work as a teacher has influenced my work as a writer much more than my work as an editor / publisher. Four Way Books, though it is my life’s work, is my job. I love my job. I love the books we produce, the staff, the board of directors, and the projects we engage in on a daily basis. But it is my job. Teaching, a job too, reminds me each day of what we need to do as writers. It reminds me to practice what I preach. As an editor, this can happen too, of course! But when I work with students on poems, I am really working with myself as well. I’ve carefully chosen my career – as publisher / editor and as teacher to feed into my work as a writer. The complaint I have, of course, is the sheer amount of work I face and how it eats into my time as a writer. I work a twelve month year. No sabbaticals to look forward to. That’s hard and wearing.

DD: You’ve taught at many universities and colleges. How has the creative writing classroom changed for you over the years?

MR: In truth, it NEVER occurred to me that I would a) publish a book and b) teach. I did not go to grad school to do either. I went to grad school to learn more about writing, and to get feedback on my poems. The mission was simple and pure. I taught because I was asked to teach. I published because I was encouraged to do so. Without those prompts, I’d be writing poems but I doubt I’d be teaching or publishing books. It was one of my teachers who said, “You are writing your first book.” This statement was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I, too, could write a book. Another teacher said, after graduation, “Send it out.” And then ambition for the work really kicked in. I wanted to be seen, read. Now, it seems to me, many students see the prize before they’ve done the work. This isn’t a criticism on my part. It’s just an answer to your question. The climate has become much more career-oriented and that, I believe, informs the weather of the workshop.

DD: In 2010, you took over the directorship of Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Can you tell us about the work you do there?

MR: I am one of several conference directors. I am not on staff there but am contracted to run one of their conferences – the Conference on Poetry – that takes place during the summer. I’ve modeled it after the best conferences / residencies I know – Bread Loaf and the residency at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Faculty deliver classes during the week, run workshops, and give readings. There’s 15 hours of workshop during the week and 6 hours of classes. Time for discussion, writing, revising, and dancing. It’s a week in heavenly NH, overlooking the White Mountains.

DD: In a New York Times profile on Four Way Books, you mention Robert Frost’s North of Boston as one of your favorite books. Can you tell us about Frost’s influence on your writing life?

MR: I like the psychological complexity that Frost achieves in his best poems, through daily speech, music, form and structure. I am character driven in my own writing, so I enjoy his sense of the dramatic and how he achieves drama on the page. Just look at these four entry lines to Frost’s poem, “The Fear”:

A lantern light from deeper in the barn Shone on a man and woman in the door And threw their lurching shadows on a house Nearby, all dark in every glossy window

He is a master of setting, of positioning and illuminating, getting us to focus on people, situations, through location and re-location.

DD: What have been the most significant changes in the poetry publishing world since you began Four Way Books in 1991?

MR: Ha and Shhh… I knew next to nothing when Four Way Books began. I learned day-by-day. And still do.

Publishers open their doors to a wider range of work these days and are more inclusive as they curate their lists. It’s certainly not as much of a club as it was, though there are many camps. The publishers I respect are becoming familiar with the camps. The pool as a result is larger and more vibrant than ever before.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

MR: Readership. Buyers of books.

DD: What are some of the collections at Four Way Books that haven’t received as much attention as they should? Which poets have you published who deserve more recognition than they have received so far?

MR: I don’t think any of our books have gotten the attention they should, or writers the recognition they deserve. I think that’s true across the board for poetry and literary fiction. I truly believe that all of our writers – absolutely all – deserve more attention, wider readership – their books (not just a poem) deserve to be course adopted.

DD: Four Way Books prides itself on publishing an extremely aesthetically diverse catalogue. In so doing, you have sidestepped some of the counterproductive sectarian squabbles of the poetry world. Can you talk about this commitment to stylistic plurality?

MR: The commitment comes from our hope that everyone feels that they can submit to Four Way Books – established or emerging, MFA or no MFA, part of a literary community or not, narrative writer or intensely lyric. We aspire toward inclusiveness.

DD: What forthcoming titles are you most excited about?

MR: I am excited about all, and look forward to the debut collection SCALE by Nathan McClain whose poems I’ve followed for a long time. It will be out in 2017. I am delighted that we are following our poets Andrea Cohen, Cynthia Cruz, Sara London, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin Prufer, Daniel Tobin with new work in the near future.

DD: Can you end the interview by giving us one of your favorite poems from a Four Way Books author?

MR: One of our poets, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, passed away this year, at a very young age, succumbing to a lung infection. She lived and worked in Houston (with a PhD from the University of Houston) and her first book, Shadow Mountain, won our Intro Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. Her second book, Bear, Diamonds and Crane was also published by Four Way Books. This poem is from Shadow Mountain and is a section from the title sequence.

ONE QUESTION, SEVERAL ANSWERS by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Where did your father live?House on Federal, City of Angels.

Where did your father live?Horse stall at a racetrack.

Where did your father live?Near the aqueduct, in a man-made desert.

Where did your father live?By a pear tree.With pears, ripe pears from that tree.

Where did your father live?Block 25.

Where did your father live?With thin strips of tarpaper.Pot under his straw mattress.

Where did your father live?Waiting in line to use the latrines.Waiting in line at the mess hall.Waiting for his parents.

Where did your father live?The Desert Chapel.

Where did your father live?With his brothers,transplants—Joshua trees.

Where did your father live?In his mother’s heart.

Where did your father live?Barrack 12, Unit 3.

Where did your father live?With 5 strand barbs.With windstorms and bitterbrush.With years of snowmelt, glacial erasure.

Martha Rhodes is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

James Fujinami Moore, editorial and publicity assistant at Four Way Books, received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College in 2016. Prior to that he majored in English and dance at Middlebury College. He is from Los Angeles.

Ryan Murphy, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of The Redcoats and Down with the Ship. He has received grants and awards from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chelsea Magazine, The Fund For Poetry, and The New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Sally Ball, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of two books of poems, Wreck Me (Barrow Street, 2013) and Annus Mirabilis (Barrow Street, 2005). In addition to her work with Four Way Books, she is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and other journals, as well as online at The Awl, Narrative, and Slate.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

September 19, 2016

In the year or so since Wild Hundreds first appeared in print, Nate Marshall’s award winning debut poetry collection feels even more necessary in the wake of the historic wave of gun violence that has rocked Chicago in 2016. Marshall’s raucous, vivid, and relentless love letter to the hundreds neighborhood on Chicago’s south side provides an apt rejoinder to the 522 homicides that have occurred in the city as of mid-September. Wild Hundreds jukes between elegy and epithalamion as it celebrates a place where “each street day is unanswered prayer for peace,” and where, for some politicians, bureaucrats, and public school administrators “every kid that’s killed is one less free lunch,/ a fiscal coup.” With exquisite care, Marshall renders the denizens of his beloved hometown in all of their vibrant complexity, from the eighth grade graduate with his Sox hat askew, skipping stones in a pond at a public park, to his own Granddaddy, “all leisure suits & peppermint,” “all birthday money & slurry speech.” In this place, where the brilliant colors in a bouquet resemble a gang war, the colors of a Grandma’s rosebush reiterate the shade of a Vice Lord’s do-rag, and the dandelions wear Latin King gold, Marshall summons his own rage so that he can remix it into a percussive imperative to thrive amidst the beautiful struggle, and, more simply, to love.

Although Marshall’s collection rightly errs on the side of the laudatory, the poet incisively critiques Chicago’s failures. Throughout Wild Hundreds, Marshall scatters “Chicago high school love letters,” poems that are poignant and heartbreaking, realistically depicting teenage desire against the backdrop of urban violence and neglect. The winter break poems read:

131.

i would airbrush you on a t-shirt.

156.

i would fight for you like my shoes or my boys or any excuse for contact.

Later in the book, Marshall notes that the numbers in these poems represent the city’s homicides during the 2007-2008 Chicago Public Schools academic year. Marshall learned early on in life, while living in the predominantly white Mount Greenwood neighborhood, the amnesia and intimacy attendant on violence. In the poem, “Alzheimer’s,” Marshall notes:

this is where i came from. whitefolk violence isn’t hypothetical to me. it’s not historical or systemic. its elementary school like Pokémon or sleepovers.

The Chicago that Nate Marshall evokes in Wild Hundreds is more than the sum of its shames and griefs and anxieties and break beats and scraped knuckles and smoking gun barrels and wild forgettings. It’s the windows rolled down on a Saturday evening in August. It’s that sweet old Curtis Mayfield Impressions song you hear out the window of a passing car, telling you to keep on pushing and it’s all right.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

September 02, 2016

DD: In her essay, “When We Dead Awaken,” Adrienne Rich writes: “For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thoughts like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be so sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.” Could you begin by talking about poetry as imaginative transformation and writing as renaming?

MS: There's no doubt that Adrienne Rich is right. Epistemologically, writing is always a transformation — an active transformation, to rephrase Rich. And in the action of it, one hears the Greek sense of the word: Poets are makers; writers are makers. May Swenson often referred to making her poems, as opposed to writing them. And, as I think any poet might agree, this work is not finished in a single poem. The task is really to rename and remake the world. That’s why Mary Oliver points out that one doesn't exactly achieve closure at the end of the poem, even when it's is an especially good poem. The making of poetry is a long-term commitment. In Oliver's world, happiness does not arise from “a job well done, but good work ongoing.”

MS: The original idea for the series emerged from a conversation I had over burgers and coffee at a local restaurant here in Logan, Utah, with Kenneth Brewer, a poetry professor at Utah State University. Ken would later become poet laureate of Utah. After we talked our way through a possible structure for the competition, I took the idea to R.R. (Zan) Knudson, who was the executor for the literary estate of May Swenson and May’s partner for the last 20 or so years of her life. Zan was well connected, especially in the New York poetry scene, and she provided introductions for me to the long list of first-tier poets and critics whom we invited to judge our competition over the years. It was important to me as director of the press that the competition not drain resources from the academic books we publish. Financing poetry is always chancy; except for the work of a handful of poets on the national scene, poetry generally could not be described as a serious profit center for any publisher that I'm aware of. We didn’t need it to turn a profit, but I wanted the competition to be self-supporting, and fortunately, it has been. Between the response of our contestants, the charity of our panel of readers, and the willingness of our judges to lend their names and labor out of love for May, we were able to build a series and make it last for 20 years.

DD: What titles do you most admire in the Utah State University Press catalog?

MS: Ha! You can't really ask an acquisitions guy to make choices among his authors. We have published many hundreds of books that I admire across several different disciplines, including poetry. I see them all as worthy.

DD: Tell us about Patricia Colleen Murphy’s debut collection.

MS: Stephen Dunn, who selected this book, calls it “wonderfully disturbing,” and I don't think I could put it better than that. One thing that works for me especially well is Trish’s sense of the body – how concrete the body is, how inarticulate. She says in one poem that it lacks language any more complex than thirst. She calls it a dog, and this reminds me very much of May Swenson's famous line "body my house, my horse, my hound.” This embodied sensibility, I think, is somehow important to the whole collection. Because thirst, if we're still thinking like Adrienne Rich, is one way to rename “sensation” or “urge” or “pain.” And there is plenty of all of these in Hemming Flames, as Trish unspools the inarticulate and animal language of the body. Wonderfully disturbing, indeed.

DD: Trish, you are currently working on a memoir that deals with much of the same source material as your poetry. Can you talk about the differences between writing in prose and poetry?

PCM: I’m trained as a poet, so the prose does not come as easily to me. I find it really difficult to work with the longer form. I keep repeating things on page 5 and page 205. Even to re-enter the work after a time away requires a six to eight hour commitment to re-read the entire piece. The reason I started the memoir in the first place, though, is there are so many details I don’t have room for in poems. Lots of facts, too, that fall flat when narrated in a poem. So the memoir really takes what you already see in Hemming Flames, and embodies it in scenes.

The memoir is pretty close. I really just have some glue work to do, and a small amount of generative work on a later chapter. I hope to have a clean draft by the end of the semester.

DD: In the world of reality television, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the boundaries of the personal and the private have blurred. The forms of confession practiced in contemporary social media are staged and superficial, contingent upon spectacle, less concerned with discovering truths than they are with generating celebrity. Shocking confessions may abound in social media today, but little retains the power either to shock or to foment meaningful change. The poems in Hemming Flames, however, are electric. You cannot read them without being changed. Can you talk about writing in the confessional mode today?

PCM: I would argue that all contemporary poetry is confessional. The details of my life happen to be pretty spectacular. I could write some pretty poems about the wind and love and puppy dogs and creosote. But that would leave quite an elephant in the room.

DD: How has your work as an editor of Superstition Review influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial work?

PCM: Being an editor has been so fulfilling; such a gift. I worked really, really hard to create a magazine with a national reputation because I wanted my students to have a professional experience that meant something on MFA and PhD applications, and in job interviews.

Being an editor has made me more thick-skinned as a writer for sure. I’ve been submitting to major literary magazines, and only top tier mags, I must say—my own standards for submissions are very stringent—since 1990. I have hard copy rejections from those years that I used to re-read and organize and catalog. Being an editor has shown me that sometimes choices are arbitrary. Like I might get three great poems about toads, and I can’t have three toad poems in one issue.

I also have become a better curator of my work. You’d be surprised how many submissions we get with five poems that seem like they were written by different people. And I would rather see a submission with three strong poems than one with three strong and two weak poems. I’ve learned that including poems that aren’t ready make the strong poems seem weaker.

Reading poetry submissions and discussing them with editors (and I read every single submission to SR) has helped me to better understand when a poem is doing surprising and delightful work that a reader will connect with. I love the feeling of reading a submission, and feeling progressively more excited with each strong line or phrase. Due to the volume of submissions, we are often reading towards a “no,” meaning we are waiting for the poem to fail at some point. We only accept something like 1% of poetry submissions, so we know most submissions are going to have a “no” moment. So when we get to a sub that is “Yes!” it is really exciting. So as a writer, I find myself writing towards that “Yes!”

My writing life affects my editing work this way. I hop into my Submittable account, and I look at the work I have out in the universe, and how I treat editors, and I expect a similar amount of respect from our authors. I also know how meaningful it is to get a little bit of love and support from an editor, so we work very hard to support our contributors even years after they have appeared in the magazine. We offer guest blog post spots, we share good news on our networks, and we’re always looking for new publications by our contributors to review on Goodreads or discuss online.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor and a poet?

PCM: Well, at SR we get a lot of fan mail. I have a folder of it and I love to read through it from time to time to remind myself of best practices and best ways to focus our time and energy. As a poet, I’ve had so many encouraging moments it’s hard to pick just one. Every publication is an encouragement, since it means I have at least one reader who gets what I’m doing. I’ve been publishing very consistently since I was young.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

PCM: I would have to say Literary Citizenship. I see a lot of poets being kind and supportive to other poets.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

PCM: Readers. And teachers. I would love to see a movement to change the poetry curriculum in middle schools and high schools. Many young people would be more interested in poetry if the course readings included poets who are alive. There is so much good contemporary poetry, and it’s a lively field, but too many students aren’t even introduced to it at all.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

PCM: Oh my goodness! That is such a hard question. May I list 100 please? Okay. It’s too much pressure. I’m going to say “Dream Song 4” by John Berryman.

DD: You have several other writing projects either underway or completed. I mentioned the memoir above. Can you tell us about these projects? What does the future hold for your writing life?

PCM: Yes, I have the memoir, and that’s the big one. I’ve been working on it for years and am finally really pretty happy with it and just need some final finishing hours.

I have two additional poetry manuscripts currently in circulation. One, titled Bully Love, examines the intersections of culture and capitalism in the desert southwest. It’s personal but focuses a lot on my experiences as a transplant to Arizona from the Midwest. The second is called Rot and it does have some highly personal moments, but with a lot more leaning towards surrealism.

I might not be in the same hurry as other academics, simply because I have such a great position and I’m not chasing the job market the way some emerging writers are. I chuckle because a writer friend and I were talking about “the machine” that is an emerging writer trying to get a job or get tenure. I get it completely. But I’m glad I don’t have to do a lot of those gymnastics.

In the next decade my life is going to change a lot because I am going to retire and move abroad. So let’s see. What’s my ten year plan? I would love to write some really good poems. Publish the memoir and the two other poetry ms’s. I’d also like to do lots of travel writing. I teach Travel Writing for ASU Online, and I’m teaching it as a study abroad in Cuba in summer 2017. It would be nice to have travel writing as a freelance gig after I’m finished with my teaching career.

DD: We’ll end with a poem from Hemming Flames. Could you pick one out and introduce it?

PCM: Sure! I’m picking a poem that I wrote after my parents both passed away five months apart in 2009. My mother dropped dead of a heart attack on June 2 of that year, and then my father became very ill with cancer but decided not to treat it and not to tell me he was sick. I called him on a Wednesday in the end of October and he couldn’t talk. He told me he had a cold. I flew to see him the next day. He weighed about 100 pounds and had baseball sized tumors on his eye and on his chest. He was dead within the week. I was so disoriented and shocked and sad and devastated and alone. I had trouble processing language and simple concepts. So I wrote this poem about a shirt. And really, if you think about a shirt for an hour or two, it’s a ridiculous and confusing object.

On Being Orphaned

I find a shirt in my hand but can’t remember the word for shirt or hand. Or how to put it on?

Something about its four holes and my four limbs. It’s too colorful. It’s too angular. Hold it up to the

light and it’s too threadbare. It’s a heap but somehow it is supposed to encompass my body? Should I cut it,

then tie it back together? Or burn it and spread the ash? I find a shirt in my hand but it might be a saucer

for my cup. It might be code for a special type of humor. It might be music. Or an elephant’s ear or a stingray.

I find a shirt in my hand and it could be political. It could be asleep and will wake if I shake it. Will it

break if I drop it? Or will it bounce? I find a shirt in my hand. I think my shadow should wear it.

For an essay on lyric narrative poetry and the legacy of Confessionalism, go here.

Founding editor of the May Swenson Poetry Award, Michael Spooner is associate director of the University Press of Colorado consortium. His published scholarly work has addressed such topics as collaboration in writing, the poetry of May Swenson, editorial response, and the role of publish-or-perish in academe. He has worked in scholarly publishing since 1984. Michael is also the author of three novels for middle grade readers.

Patricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her book of poems, Hemming Flames, won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award and was published in 2016 by Utah State University Press. A chapter from her memoir in progress was published by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and most recently in Black Warrior Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Burnside Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, Hobart, decomP, Midway Journal, Armchair/Shotgun, and Natural Bridge. She lives in Phoenix, AZ.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry.